


Borderless Sky

by duckbunny



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Empire 2020, Empire LRP
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, Gen, Magic, Merrow, Space!, adventures in time and space, fish jokes, responsible use of magic, sparklefish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-27
Updated: 2015-12-26
Packaged: 2018-04-06 13:08:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 34,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4222848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/duckbunny/pseuds/duckbunny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Awoke in unfamiliar place with unknown man, grey haired, in dark clothing. No memory of anything likely to produce visions. Slept last night in tarry in Broceliande.  Now dressed and carrying standard loadout. Chain & belt worn, no staff. Uncertain of present reality..."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Ambassadorial Gatekeeper

**Author's Note:**

> So basically, I'm a terrible person, and this is a crossover between an alternate universe version of the Empire LRP setting some of us have been throwing around for a couple of years, codename: Empire 2020, and Doctor Who. Because I'm just awful.  
> Many characters from the canonical Empire game, including my own, will feature in this. Names will be changed to protect the reincarnated. Obvious parallels are probably deliberate. Yvain is Mari, although sufficiently a different character that I renamed her to avoid confusing myself. Her opinions and attitude may or may not reflect Mari's canonical ones and I'm not going to tell you which is which, unless I happen to feel like it, in which case I will tell you about it with gay abandon.

She has no idea where she is.  
There is a column, rising from floor to ceiling, past a narrow balcony. The upper terminus is a staggered inverted conic pyramid, carved - no, etched - with symbols she cannot read. The column may extend through the floor, into the sublayer she can see around the edges, but here it is wrapped by an octagonal bench, covered in switches and buttons. The air is still and heavy and tastes of secrets.  
On the balcony, leaning back against the railing, is a man in clothes as dark as a Highborn’s. His hair is grey, his shoulders bowed. He does not seem to have noticed her.  
She checks herself over, quietly, breathing slow and careful to avoid disturbing him. All her limbs are present and correct. Her knife is sheathed where it belongs. She has her satchel and, she has to assume, its contents. Her chain and pendants are chill against her neck, colder than a summer night should make them. Stiff leather bracers hug her arms, peerless artisan work she _knows_ you can’t take with you, and the familiar pressure on her head means the matching circlet.  
She loosens the strap holding her notebooks in their pouch, snug on her belt, always with her. This may be a dream, or it may be a true vision. The stranger doesn’t move as she pulls out the proper notebook, but the click of the pen rouses him, and he turns as she begins to write. 

“Awoke in unfamiliar place with unknown man, grey haired, in dark clothing. No memory of anything likely to produce visions. Slept last night in tarry in Broceliande. Now dressed and carrying standard loadout. Chain & belt worn, no staff. Uncertain of present reality. If vision, current date is post-electricity. Flatscreens evident, also analogue controls.”  
She clicks her pen shut, and looks up at the stranger, hands loose and unthreatening by her sides.

He is tall and thin, no sign of lineage upon him, face bare. His clothes are simple, black, but not Highborn; he wears a coat without symbol of Chapter and his shirt is as dark as the rest. He stares back, and she files that away in her memory: _he is observant and taking mental notes on me; I am unexpected; he does not take me as an immediate threat;_ and then he is walking down the steps to her level, and she notices that he is unarmed.

“What are you doing?”  
“I’m taking notes on what just happened, so that I don’t forget the details.”  
“Are you likely to?”  
“People are terrible at remembering when they’re confused, I doubt I’m an exception.”  
He moves over to the bench, still staring. She feels a strong desire to back away, which she recognises as arising from his personal charisma, and notes that alongside _observant_ in her mental file on him.  
“Who are you, and what are you doing on my ship?”  
“My name is Yvain Worldscribe, and my last memory is of falling asleep in my own tent, in a tarry near the Broch. This is not an ordinary ship.”  
The stranger raises an eyebrow, just slightly. “It’s a space ship. And you don’t remember getting here - that’s never good. One question. Potentially quite important. Why are you a fish?”

She takes half a step forward and folds her arms, irritation rising, unhelpful but easily controlled. “That sounded like an honest question. But you should know that, where I come from, the way you phrased it is extremely rude. I am a merrow. I am not a fish. I have warm blood, and hair, and I drown in water. I am as human as anyone else.”  
“Apart from the shiny scales and the gills. Or does everyone have gills where you come from?” He looks unimpressed by her little speech, glaring fiercely at his screens and fiddling with his machine. She tells herself that nobody stares like he did at someone they aren’t interested in, and makes herself be polite.  
“No, we don’t all have gills. About eighty-five percent of us are baseline humans.”  
“And the rest are - “ she can hear him not saying ‘fish’ - “like you?”  
“The rest are lineaged, yes. About one in six of those are merrow.” She smiles slightly, correlating _fish_ with _does everyone_ and _like you_. “Would you like me to name the other lineages?”  
He looks up sharply.  
“You’ve never seen a merrow before, you didn’t know what we were called. You didn’t know whether we were universal, therefore, you don’t know what lineage is, and you are from some other place entirely. If you were just a foreigner, they’d have us where you come from too. Wait. Space ship. You already told me that, sorry, I’m being slow - why do you look human?”  
He glares at her over the control panel, but she doesn’t think he means it. “Well. It’s your first day. I’ll forgive you. Is it heritable?”  
“Sometimes. Other times, caused by enviromental conditions during pregnancy, or in the case of briars induced by exposure to spring magic at potentially any time of life.”  
“Induced, or expressed?”  
“Age-old question, not adequately answered yet.”  
“What do you think?”  
She returns his gaze steadily, gives him the honest answer. “Induced is more likely. Expressed would be better for the briars. It’s harder to hate someone if they’ve been that way all along.”  
She watches him file that away, resist the impulse to argue over it right now, and wonders if she looks like that when she’s processing data.  
“Where are we?”  
He looks at another screen. “Near the Crab Nebula. In space.” He’s watching her closely, her reaction to that matters to him, and so she makes her excitement show, because he’s probably rubbish at reading merrow expressions, and grins.  
“Windows?”  
“Better.”

It is better. The door swings open and there is space, right in front of her, the vast expanse of the deep stretching out. No glass, no portholes, nothing to stop her from stepping out, except that that would likely be fatal. She has questions - _why doesn’t the air escape, why do we have gravity in here, why would you ever land again_ \- but they line up neatly in the back of her mind to be asked later, because right now she wants to look.  
The nebula glows, purple and blue and veins and swirls of every colour. The stars blaze out around it, and between them there is only the deep lovely darkness, the very archetype of blackness, and she floats in it. She stares and stares and there is never an end to them.  
When the stranger speaks, he is tender, hopeful. “What do you think?”  
She looks at him once, knowing her smile is ridiculously broad, but he can’t hold her eyes when there is all this to gaze out upon. “I like your ship,” she says, and beside her he puts his hands in his pockets and leans against the doorframe.  
“She’s called the Tardis. And I’m the Doctor. And this, Yvain Worldscribe, is the universe.”

***

“What are you doing, anyway? Are you counting them? You do know the number keeps changing, don’t you? They’re always being born and dying, you’ll never reach the end of them.”  
She is kneeling in the doorway, still gazing out into space. “I’m not counting them.”  
“Well, that’s good, because you wouldn’t be able to anyway. Nobody could. Well, I probably could, if I put my mind to it, but my mind’s a lot bigger than yours. What’s wrong with you, anyway? You’ve been staring at it for thirty-eight minutes and you’ve moved twice. You lot can’t do that, you’re always talking, always asking stupid questions like “why doesn’t the air fall out” and “are we really in space” and - you’re just staring. Is that a fish thing? Have you all got glacial attention spans?”  
She looks at him sharply, over her shoulder, and he smirks.  
If she complains, he’ll just keep making fish jokes, which in her experience is very hard to train out of someone. Instead, she tears herself away from the view, shuts the door behind her and pretends that she doesn’t have pins and needles in both her legs. “Sorry. I didn’t notice the time passing.”  
That turns the smirk into a real smile. “Don’t worry about that. There’s plenty of it. But we still have a mystery between us, you and I.” He turns serious, steps around the controls to face her down. “How did you get onto my ship? Who sent you? And why don’t you remember it?”  
She winces. “I’ve been thinking about that. I may be able to answer the last part.”  
“Thinking? You haven’t been thinking, you’ve been staring into space, literally.”  
“And thinking. I can think about more than one thing at once, I’m not completely stupid.”  
“That’s good, because I don’t like stupid people on my ship. No stupid people here, except sometimes me. What’s your idea?”  
“There’s a piece of Night magic, quite easy to do, called Cast Off the Chain of Memory. It can only be cast on a willing target and normally the target remembers the ritual being cast, but it might be possible to include it in the things to be forgotten.”

He raises bushy grey eyebrows. “Magic?”  
“Yes.”  
“Well, it can’t be that, can it? Magic isn’t real. It’s mummery, carnival tricks. I tell you that when you wake up, you’re going to feel very happy, and you do, because you’re human, you’re a very suggestible species. But it couldn’t actually make you forget, or move you onto my ship, because it doesn’t really exist.”  
She stares at him. That’s a claim almost worthy of laughing aloud.  
“What? What did I say? Did I say something wrong? Have my ears turned green? What’s so funny?”  
“Magic’s not real. Really? That’s - that’s like saying fire isn’t real.”  
“It’s just physics, really, superheated ions producing light due to rapid oxidation. Magic’s like that, there’s always a reasonable explanation once you start looking for it.”  
“The reasonable explanation is that magic exists. The magic we do has direct, measurable effects on the world, it has been used throughout history and by every culture and I saved six lives with it last week.”  
“Did you? Or did you just fool yourself into thinking you’d healed them? Sick people need medicine, not magic.”  
“They weren’t sick, they were poisoned, and they did have medical treatment. The physick called me in. I cast Ascetic Star and they were cured. I don’t understand how you ever came to believe magic was fake. There are some zealots in Highguard who hold it’s a corrupting influence, but I’ve never heard anyone deny its reality. Congratulations, you’re uniquely wrong.”  
He’s agitated now, stalking around, tone betraying real irritation rather than the facade of grumpiness. “You know, I had high hopes of you. I thought you were clever. I thought you might know how to think.”

She runs through her options. She’s in space, in a ship she can’t fly, with a man who doesn’t believe magic exists. He has also never encountered lineage, but he looks human, so something is curious there. He might be insane, but he’s evidently still capable of operating complex machinery. She can’t leave, that isn’t physically possible, and while he’s unarmed he’s probably physically stronger than her. She can’t take over his ship, because she can’t fly it. The only workable option for medium-term survival, let alone ever finding her way home, is to humour him.  
“But oh no, no, you think magic is real. You think it’s self-evident. It’s woolly thinking! You ought to know better. You’re letting yourself down, just swallowing all this nonsense.”  
Also, she’s unlikely to be able to get hold of crystal mana, so actually _doing_ any magic is going to be tricky.  
“How do you even invent anything when your whole culture thinks that magic works? Those people you think you’ve saved, how are they going to be helped by real medicine when your physicks are bringing them to you so you can chant mumbo-jumbo over them? What’s that meant to acheive? It might make them feel better, but it doesn’t stop them dying later, does it?”  
She does have her personal mana, and the handful of spells all magicians learn. If she had a magical object, she could bind him to it and prove that he can use it afterwards, but - no. Detect Magic only reveals information to her so it won’t prove anything to him, and in any case it only uncovers magical information. Operating a portal is impossible unless there’s a portal around to be operated which seems unlikely in deep space. She does, however, know how to create a night pouch. Her own is on her belt as usual, but anything of hers will just reinforce his belief that she’s a charlatan.  
“Do you have a container I could borrow?”

“A container? What, are you going to be sick? I don’t want you being sick on my Tardis, that’s one of the rules you know.”  
“A container, no larger than eighteen inches by six by six. Traditionally, a cloth or leather bag, but a box with a lid will do.”  
“Oh. Are you going to do magic now? Is that what this is, you’re going to prove to me that it works?”  
“Or you’re going to prove to me that it doesn’t. If my entire civilisation is based on a delusion, then I’d like to know that.”  
“No. You wouldn’t,” he says, and now he’s not just wrong but insulting and she’s had enough.  
“Yes. I would. Magic destroyed my home. Magic is how we’re reclaiming it. If magic doesn’t work, then we’re wasting our time, and we could be doing something else to get our cities back faster so yes, Doctor, I would like to know if we have been doing the wrong thing.”  
He’s searching around the shelves on his balcony, but when he comes back he’s somber, not mocking, and he hands her the velvet bag he’s found in silence. He shrugs and gestures at it - show me - and she fishes a stick of chalk out of her satchel and uses the floor as a table.

She speaks softly, not really caring whether he follows what she’s doing. “I invoke Diras, the dark lantern, the rune of secrets, to conceal all that lies within.” Trace the rune, twice, two neat strokes framing dark velvet, turn over the bag, draw the two bold lines of Hirmok. “I invoke Hirmok, the talons, the rune of dominion, to bind this working to my will alone.” Trace it over, flip, trace, feel the magic settling into place like a familiar weight in her pocket.  
He’s leaning against his machine, watching her, frowning deeply, when she holds out the enchanted bag. “Put something in it.”  
“What?”  
“Put something in it. You won’t trust the results if it’s mine or I handle it, so drop something in the bag.”  
He sighs, fumbles in his pockets, finally pulls a little metal token out of his machine and drops it in. She closes the bag, puts it down, and steps away, arms crossed. “Take it out again.”  
“You know, your act could really do with work. It’s not very convincing. It needs more flash.”  
He fumbles with the bag. He frowns. He glares at her for a moment, and then he’s running around his machine and shining lights on it, snatching a tool from his pocket to buzz and shine and measure it, and staring at her.  
“That’s impossible.”

She shrugs. “Standard spell, where I’m from. Anyone can learn to do it.”  
“Where are you from? Also, I will need that back, and these readings are telling me that scissors aren’t going to do it.”  
She follows him around the machine, picks it up, and takes out the little token. “It’s keyed to me. It’s bound to me, it’s... mine. Only I can open it, to take things in or out. If I turned it inside out, it would work just the same. It’s called a Night Pouch. You could break it easily with Day magic - I could do it - but it’s rarely worth the trouble or the mana, so it’s an acceptable degree of privacy.”

He looks like he’s ignoring her, pulling screens to face him and flicking switches, but she’s got a guess he’s a bit merrow around the edges; he can multitask at least as well as she can.  
“I’m from Therunin, in the east of the Empire of the Way. I’m afraid I can’t tell you where the planet is.”  
“I’m getting very strange energy readings off you - bits of you are practically glowing. Is that magic? Do you have magical tattoos?”  
“Yes.”  
“Ordinarily, that would have been a joke, but today, I really have no idea. I don’t know where you planet is, either, so getting you home might be difficult. You’ve got energy going on all over you, though, it’s not just your tattoos. It’s concentrated in things you’re wearing, but it’s also in you. Every cell in your body is infused with it. It’s in your DNA, it’s in your blood. It’s like you’re partly built from it.”  
“Well... I am.”  
“You knew about this?”  
“I’m guessing. But I think you’re looking at my lineage. That energy, in my genes, in my cells, I think that’s what makes me a merrow.”  
“Do you want it? I could build a thing to bleed the energy off, but I’m not sure you’d survive it, it’s so deep inside you, I think you might be stuck with it -”  
“Don’t you even try.”  
“You want it? You want to keep it? That’s a very healthy attitude, bear your burdens with grace, well done.”  
“It’s not a burden. It’s part of who I am. Lineage doesn’t just give you scales, Doctor, it changes how you think. And how I think is who I am. How my mind is put together - that’s me. I don’t want it bled away. I don’t want to become someone else, just to be more like a baseline. I want to be me, and I am a merrow. Don’t try to take that away. Don’t try to fix me. You wouldn’t be helping. I’m not broken, Doctor. I’m lineaged. And those aren’t even slightly alike.”

He’s staring at her again. She stares back. There is no backing down on this.  
“That was quite a speech. Who are you?”  
She smirks. She’d like to call it a smile, or a grin, but she’s just startled someone out of underestimating her, and she’s pretty sure it’s a smirk. “Conclave politician and interdimensional diplomat.”  
Those eyebrows again. “Really? Well, you’re doing an excellent job so far. Colour me impressed by the caliber of diplomat your planet produces. Are you hungry?”  
She raises an eyebrow of her own.  
“Well. I don’t know where your planet actually is. So it might take me a while to get you home. But, in the meantime, we’ve got every planet there is. A whole universe of breakfast options.” He’s hopeful now, though he’s trying to hide it; he really wants her to like him. “You’ve been looking at those stars from a distance. I can show them to you close up.”  
“It’s an _instantaneous_ spaceship.”  
He smiles, and shrugs, and his good spirits are catching; she grins back. “Breakfast sounds good.”


	2. The Lure of Distant Shores

It really is nearly instantaneous. He plays with some controls, pulls a lever, the column in the middle - engine? - moves and shrieks for a few seconds, and then there’s a very final-sounding clang and he’s heading for the doors. She lets him usher her out first, and spins on the spot, of course, to look for the first time at the ship.  
It’s a tall blue box, apparently wooden, labelled POLICE PHONE BOX, light on top - “It’s disguised. Is that automatic?”  
“It’s supposed to be,” he says awkwardly. “I’ve been meaning to get that fixed. Turn around. Go on, turn around. It’s your first alien planet, you ought to look at it.”

The sky is blazingly green, and so much like home that she blinks. But it’s not trees overhead, stretching their canopies out to hide the sun, it’s the sky itself, soaring high, with the sun a bright painful disc peeking over the buildings. They’re in an alley, and then they are in a crowded street as wide as the heart of Tassato, and the market swallows them.  
She can feel the culture shock setting in. Everything is slightly wrong. The colours are Brass Coast, the architecture is League. She wants to write down everything but she sits on that impulse hard: she can’t write down everything, she doesn’t know what would be useful, and she has the very strong feeling that she won’t be staying long. First impressions can be recorded later, when she has some idea of what’s distinctive and what’s just leaping out at foreign eyes, and the thought of being a foreigner here makes her blink again, because she can understand every word she hears.

“Doctor. Why are they all speaking Imperial?”  
He smirks, just slightly. He enjoys this, watching people react to what he’s seen before. She can understand that.  
“They’re not. The Tardis is translating for you.”  
“The Tardis speaks Imperial.”  
“No, don’t be stupid, if the Tardis spoke Imperial then I would know where you come from, wouldn’t I? No. The Tardis is telepathic. Pure meaning, beamed into your head. You only hear Imperial because it’s what you expect. It’s why you understood me.”

Breakfast, when they find it, is almost Urizeni, and she knows it makes no sense to try to understand this culture in terms of Imperial nations but she can’t help it, just yet.  
It’s rice and mushrooms, which are both very normal, and eggs, which are startlingly pink but taste richly eggy, almost like duck eggs, and a clear green sauce which she was expecting to be seaweed or fish or something of that kind.  
She scoops some rice-and-sauce into her mouth - chopsticks here, very Urizen indeed - and chews thoughtfully.  
“It’s chocolatey.”  
“It’s good,” the Doctor says with his mouth full, “it’s actually made from fermented beans.”  
“So is chocolate.” She considers her bowl. “It is pretty good, though. Sweets for breakfast, very League.”  
“What’s the League? No, don’t tell me, it’s one of the nations in your little Empire. Not yours, though. Where are you from?”  
“I’m Navarri. You can tell by the tattoos. Nobody else does tattoos like we do.” She glances around the market. “Sorry, I’ve just realised that’s not why people are staring and it’s taking a moment to come to terms with.”  
He pauses in his eating. “Are they staring at you?”  
“I’m the only merrow in the marketplace. I’m the only lineaged in this marketplace. And my scales are not subtle. I’m probably reflecting halfway down the street. Yes, they’re staring.”

He doesn’t meet her eyes. She lets it lie for a minute, finishes her rather good eggs. “Doctor, be honest. Are there any lineaged outside of my world? You’ve travelled, but you’d never heard of us, never seen us. Lineage is magical, and you thought that wasn’t real, either, you thought it was self-evidently trickery. Am I the only merrow out here?”  
“Possibly. Probably. Yes. We’re in the same boat, you and I. Both just trying to find a way home.”  
“You look so human.” It’s a cheap shot, but so are the fish jokes. “Everyone does. Convergent evolution is a nice theory, but this is ridiculous.”  
“It’s not convergent evolution. Well, this is, you and I looking alike, but you and them. You don’t look alike. You’re actually the same species. You are alike.”  
She stares around the market, at the people in their bright clothes, their bare faces, seeing all the ways in which he’s right. “We haven’t invented space travel yet,” she says softly, and she’s worked this out but she wants to hear it confirmed.  
“But they have. I thought it would be better to break it to you gently. Your people, you didn’t evolve on your planet. You evolved on Earth, thousand of years ago. You’re colonists, probably, or a shipwreck, maybe. Same as these people, they’re a colony. Humans have been spreading through the galaxy for a while now. Most of you are actually from space.” He pauses, watching her watching the crowds and watching him, too, in her peripheral vision.  
“Are you okay? Most people freak out by this point in the conversation.”  
“I am freaking out.”  
“Well, you don’t look it. You’re eating chocolate eggs on an alien planet with a man from space and look at you. Cool as a cucumber.”  
“Merrow superpowers. Just because we don’t wave our arms and shout, doesn’t mean we aren’t feeling anything.” She’s feeling angry and scared and disoriented and lonely and homesick and distinctly sarcastic, but he’s probably only picking up on the last part, and she’s going to have to translate everything into baseline for everyone she meets until she can go home, because there is nobody in all the universe who knows how to read her face except her, and that is making her distinctly uncomfortable and scared too because everyone is going to stare at her and nobody is going to know what she is saying. And she should probably tell him all this, just to make the point, but she doesn’t want to start itemising her emotions like paying attention isn’t his problem, because that is always how it goes, people assume you’re cold because you don’t shout and when you point out their error they act like it’s your fault they had their eyes closed.  
Meanwhile, she’s thinking about space colonists and horses; merrow superpowers.

“Two waves of colonisation.”  
“Why do you say that? You’ve only just heard of the concept.”  
“Because it explains the horses.”  
“Horses? Horses. Horses... no, you’ve lost me there. They would be an import to your planet just like everything else.”  
“But only with the second wave of colonisation.” She sets down her empty bowl. “Legend, or history, and those are almost the same thing when the Highborn are writing - legend has it that the Highborn came across the sea in seven ships, and they brought with them horses, which had never before been seen on the Bay of Cattazar. They conquered territory and founded the nation of Highguard, and later they discovered the Way of Virtue, and later still, the First Empress rode out and founded the Empire. The story goes that the First Empress and the last horse died in battle together, but better research suggests we had horses for probably sixty years after that. But they all died out. No more horses. The Highborn kept cutting their balls off and it turns out that’s not good for species survival.”  
“Okay. Horses, balls, extinct, got that - how does that mean two lots of colonists?”  
“Because we’ve mapped the world, now, and there are no horses anywhere. Nobody who looks much like the Highborn, either, but the legends say they were malcontents who left seeking a less corrupt way of life and we know they had a revolution later, so they needn’t look very much like their origins by now. But the horses, they’re a mystery. Never been seen on the bay of Catazzar before the Highborn sailed up, and never been seen anywhere else either. No horseshoes, no saddles, no paintings, no records.”

He’s grinning now, in genuine pleasure. Puzzles and logic. Maybe it won’t be too bad. “Oh, Yvain. You’re right. They didn’t come across the sea, they came from space. So we can just track down some records, look for a pattern of emigration that matches the timing of those two waves, and find out where they were going. Easy! We’ll have you home in no time.”  
“It’s going to be a little harder than that.”  
“No, it all works, we even know that only the second wave took horses with them, it’ll be a unique pattern.”  
“I don’t know how long seperates the waves.”  
“Did your people forget about record-keeping? Not even an inkling? No more legends of invasions?”  
“Several, but all from known locations. All our ancient history has either been burned, or turned into compost.”  
“How?”  
“One mad emperor, one unnatural disaster. The mad emperor burned down all the libraries, and the disaster wiped out the whole civilisation. It was centuries before the Empire was even founded - anything not carved in stone is long gone.”

It’s a relief to get back to the Tardis, and she notes it down with interest in her mental file on herself: _sufficiently freaked out by alien planet that returning to an alien’s spaceship feels like safety._ He tells her not to break anything and disappears into the undercroft; that is also a relief. She needs time to get her thoughts in order. The direct consequences of her people secretly being space colonists go far beyond explaining the horses, and she needs time to work them out and get her facts in order. She’s also feeling weepy from the culture shock and she’d prefer to process that before she has a very undignified crying fit.

She writes it down; it’s always been her way of getting her thoughts combed out. _We are all space colonists, in two waves, seperated by at least a thousand years but potentially much longer. The second wave contained Highborn (therefore also Freeborn) and horses, first wave contained Terun, Urizen forebears, Vard, Ushkans, Dawnish? foreigners? orcs?_  
“Doctor?” she calls, not looking round.  
“Yes?” he calls back, not coming out from his tinkering.  
“Ever heard of an orc?”  
“They’re imaginary.”  
“Probably native then. Thanks.”  
_Orcs considered imaginary by Doctor. Likely native inhabitants of planet. Magic appears unique to us, likewise Lineage. Lineage speculated to utilise same energy as magic, woven into every cell; unable to test whether this is instead personal mana or hearth magic._  
On a different page, in the notebook that lives in her Night Pouch, because some things are private: _find myself wishing for Twilight Masquerade to conceal unique Lineage. This is not Proud but I am feeling it._  
Back to her ordinary notes: _could Leviathan answer cause of translation onto Tardis?_  
can Leviathan see things off-world?  
can we test that? yes - why did the first human inhabitants come to this planet?  
if magic is unique to us then presumably so are Eternals. Hypothesis: humans came to the planet, encountered the ambient magic of the Realms, began to produce Lineaged children for the first time and developed magic, learning to perform rituals and speak with Eternals. Heralds likely introduced themselves rapidly - note that these would be Eternal-species Heralds, not human-origin.  
Orcs evolved to be resistant to alteration by Realm exposure? Humans susceptible - speculate all Herald-human matings involve human-origin Heralds.  
Realms localised phenomena or concentrated phenomena? do portals exist off-planet? do regio exist off-planet? if not, impossible to perform Leviathan except at home  
someone will ask Leviathan what caused me to disappear with no sign of a body or (probably?) a struggle. could this lead to discovery of space travel?

The Doctor clatters up the stairs and stares at her like he’s just had an epiphany. It’s so like Vespasian’s wide-eyes revelation-face that she can’t help liking him better for it.  
“What did you say?”  
Yvain blinks. “Orcs are probably native?”  
“No, before that. Before all of that. You said you were a diplomat.”  
“Yes, I did.”  
“You said you were an _interdimensional_ diplomat. You don’t have space travel. So, where do the dimensions come in?”  
“Well, ordinarily I would say ‘inter-realm’, but - spaceship. I thought dimension would be more communicative.”  
“I don’t care what you call it. What were you actually talking about? Who are you diplomatic at?”  
“Beings from other planes of existence which intersect with the mundane world, said planes being the source of all ritual magic.”  
He’s scanning her with his buzzing wand again. “Dimensional energy. That’s what it is, I should have recognised it. Stupid, stupid Doctor. You - you are partway into another dimension.”  
She smiles. “The Realm of Day.”  
“You’re very sure.”  
“I’m a merrow, it’s common knowledge that we’re day-touched. Also, I’m a day mage. Also also, I’m _the_ Daymage, so yes, I am very sure that if I’m part anything it’s of Day.”  
“You get a definite article now? You didn’t tell me that when I asked who you were. Who are you really? Don’t leave anything out. Don’t try to translate. It all might be important. Anything might be the clue to how you ended up here so stop being mysterious and just tell me what’s going on.”

She meets his gaze levelly. “You haven’t told me your name, where you’re from, what you’re doing, what you want. I have no reason to trust you. I’m still not entirely sure that you’re not a danger to my Empire. But you really don’t seem to know where it is, so I thought it was safe to mention my Imperial title, which if you had kidnapped me deliberately might have brought considerable danger to the Empire. I have responsibilities, and your curiosity is not enough to override them.”  
He’s agitated, stalking around. Little bit Briar. Wrong paradigm. But even so, he is. Can’t keep still when he’s angry.  
“You really think I’d kidnap you? You think I care about your petty little human wars? You showed up on my ship out of nowhere and now you’re lying to me. I ought to just throw you out. Go on, off my Tardis, find your own way home. Or, tell me the truth. There isn’t a third option here. You can’t be here and treat me like an enemy. You either get off my ship, or you tell me the truth.”

The threat shakes her, as she knows it’s meant to. It might even be serious. She’s not certain he’s certain about that. But all her political instincts tell her this is a challenge, and not to be backed down from. She’s got too much Pride to roll over because someone shouts at her. He’s merrow enough, surely, to respect an intellectual argument even when he’s fighting. So she stands her ground and makes one.  
“Do I have a better chance of getting home in here, or out there?”  
“What?”  
“You offered me a choice. I’m considering it. I appeared on a spaceship with a lone pilot who declares magic to be unreal. I have only your word that magic is not known elsewhere. You might just be unhinged, and my best chance of getting home lie outside those doors.”  
“Don’t be ridiculous. Wait, no, you’re not being ridiculous. Be more ridiculous! Take a chance, have a little faith. Trust me. No, those people out there, they can’t get you home.”  
“But you can.”  
“Probably. Eventually. See, this is me being honest with you. I don’t know where home is right now, but when I do, I can get you there. Just... give me time to find it.”

It’s a long tense moment before she nods. “Okay. I will take a chance. You realise you haven’t proved anything, of course.”  
He shrugs. “Neither have you.”  
“My name is Yvain Worldscribe. I am a member of the Open Skies banner and the Order of the Celestial Arch. I have held the Imperial title of Archmage of Day, colloquially “the Daymage”, for fourteen months. The purpose of an Archmage is to be the Empire’s representative to their Realm and a publically available expert on all matters relating to it. As such, my sudden disappearance is an embarrasment to the Empire, the more so since at least part of my regalia has accompanied me. I am a Vate and a Brand in accordance with Navarri traditions.”

He’s staring again. Merrow infodump, she thinks wryly, he’s never met it before. “Any questions? I don’t know what you’d find significant.”  
“Got any enemies?”  
“I’m an Imperial Archmage. If anyone hates the Empire, I’m a valid target. Besides that, well, the Canterspire don’t like me much since I took their favourite job, but I don’t think they’d throw me into deep space for it. Some of the more isolated Navarri think my national loyalties are doubtful, but they’re isolated Navarri, so again, not their style.”  
“More the spreading rumours type?”  
“More the poisoned knives in the dark. They’re very direct people.”  
“No personal enemies, then? Nobody who might want to hurt you.”  
“No. That’s a surprise, I must be doing something right. Plenty of impersonal enemies, though. Three orc tribes we’re hostile with, one active war, and the Vallorn, though whether that’s capable of identifying enemies who aren’t actively hitting it with axes is questionable.”  
“Probably not important, then.” She raises an eyebrow. He looks very slightly abashed. “To how you got here. It’s obviously important to you personally and someday you can tell me all about it. I need some of your blood.”  
“...In for a ring, in for a crown.”

For some reason he’s got a complete blood-drawing kit in his pocket, which does not seem likely to be the most sterile place possible, but she can always Ascetic Star herself if she gets infected. He manages to find the vein in her elbow on the second try. She’s endured less competent phlebotomists. She presses cotton wool against the puncture while he fiddles with his control panel and the tube of blood; this thing seems to do everything. “It’s going to take a while to get results from that. Maybe a day. So I thought maybe, in the meantime... why are you staring like that?”  
“Just ask. Whatever it is you’re dancing around, just ask it.”  
He hesitates for a breath. “Supernova?”

He knows the answer before she says it, and he’s excited and it’s catching and she was never going to decline an offer like that so, “Yes.”


	3. The Dance of Navarr and Thorn

After the supernova, which is everything a supernova could possibly be and has to be watched through smoked glass and warms her skin across a billion miles of space, there is a galactic cluster, a hundred thousand stars crammed into a corner of space by their own galaxy, and the starlight is bright as noon. The Doctor borrows her night pouch again, because he “needs a dimensional artifact” and she can make Night Pouches every day if he breaks that, unlike anything else she’s got. After that, there’s a planet, uninhabited, but strewn with ruins just slightly the wrong proportions for humans. Too wide for their height, and the writing is like nothing she’s ever seen and she knows people who couldn’t be torn away from here in a lifetime. The Doctor isn’t one of them, but he tells her stories, about the people who lived here, the way they raise space-goats and grew wheat, well, it was like wheat, that was blue and shoulder-high. They grew it in mazes, and after the harvest they’d play hide and seek all through the corn fields and then burn off the stubble.

He’s making a chalk rubbing of one of the carvings when she finds the courage to ask. “Doctor, are you stalling?”  
“What?”  
“It doesn’t look like you’re working very hard to get me home. It looks like you’re courting me, with a universe.”  
He doesn’t look round. “Is it working?”  
“Of course it is.”

He folds up his rubbing and comes over to where she sits, perched on thousand-year ruins. “So why not keep doing it? This is my life, every day, travel the universe, see wonders. But it’s not so much fun on my own. You make good company. Come with me.”  
She closes her eyes for a moment. That offer hurts. When she speaks, her voice is clear and calm and doesn’t shake. “I want to. But I can’t.”  
“Why not? I know you want to go home, and I will find out where that is, but for the moment, what’s the hurry?”  
“Because every day that I choose to stay away, I stand in breach of my oaths. I am thrice sworn to the good of the Empire, and I can’t serve it if I’m not there.” She can’t quite bring herself to make eye contact. “I have an Empire to work for, and a Vallorn to work against, and I can’t do that from space. I wish I could.”

He sits down next to her, not demanding, offering comfort. “Maybe you can.”  
“How?”  
“How did you get here?”  
“I told you, I don’t know-”  
“No, I mean, how did you get _here_.”  
Realisation. “In a space ship.”  
“Maybe I could do more than just get you home. Maybe I could help.” He folds his hands together, leans on his knees, looks out at the distant blue horizon. It’s so human it hurts. “I said you could tell me all about it sometime.”  
“I thought you were fobbing me off.”  
“Well, I was, but I’m listening now. Tell me about your home. Tell me about the Vallorn, and the cities you’re trying to reclaim.”

She doesn’t want to look at him, because she doesn’t want to be reminded of how human he looks, when he knows so little, and offers so much. So she slides off her rock, to sit on the stubby grass and lean her back against it, where all she can see is his legs, and looks out at a dead world.

“Once upon a time, but not so long ago that we have forgotten, there was a nation called Terunael. They lived on the Bay of Catazzar, from the mountains to the plains. They built great glittering cities, and roads, and orchards. They learned magic, and they did wonders. They brought endless summer to the icy wastes of Otkodov, and their great houses played host to heralds. But they got greedy, or scared, or desperate. For all their wonders, the land stopped producing, and the people stopped having children. So they turned, as they always had, to magic.

They called upon the realm of Spring, which is a place of fertility, of life unbounded, to make their lands blossom. It went wrong. It went as wrong as anything can go. They called out, or they created, something more monstrous than they could possibly have imagined.

Overnight, the nation of Terunael was gone. All its great cities were broken, all its wonders consumed, and by sunrise, there was nothing left. Only the darkness of the forest, the endless reaching green of the trees, and a few scattered survivors. And the forest kept spreading. It began in the cities, but it ate up the farmland and the roads and the rivers. And the people. Everyone who died in the cities, they didn’t turn quietly into compost. They became puppets. thorns growing out through their skin, and malice in their eyes. And you could kill them again, but you couldn’t stop the trees. Axes, and fire, they just made it angry. You couldn’t kill it that way, you couldn’t even contain it.

That’s where Navarr comes into the story. Navarr isn’t the name of a nation. It’s the name of a person. Our founding hero. She and her lover Thorn survived the coming of the Vallorn, found the other survivors, forged them into something resembling a people again. And together they created a magic that had never been needed before. The biggest ritual, perhaps, that has ever been done. Legend says a hundred magicians died doing it, but I think it was all of them. I think it took every spring mage they had, every youngster who could be taught enough to throw just a little more power into the working. And they made a network of magical paths across all their fallen nation, and we’ve been walking the trods ever since. They leach power from the Vallorn. Weaken it. When you’ve weakened it enough, and found the huge magical effect from somewhere that it takes, you can destroy it. Clear out the Vallorn completely, send the land back to normal, get back the ruins of a city, rebuild.

It works. We know it works. But it is heartbreakingly slow. About half the nation of Navarr is out on the trods on any given day and so far, we’ve averaged a rate of one city every thousand years. We take an oath, every one of us. It’s called the Binding of Thorns and every adult Navarri has a tattoo to mark that oath. That’s the defining feature of our nation, what we can’t forget and can’t stop doing, because only walking the trods holds the Vallorn in check.

That’s why I can’t stay. That’s the enemy I am sworn to fight.”  
“The trees.”  
“The Vallorn isn’t the trees. It’s not just a forest. It’s an ecosystem. It’s like a cross between a jungle and a malignant tumour.”  
“So you need a weapon.” His tone is bleak, but then, so is hers.  
“I need a magical weapon. Mundane ones - well. We’ve come a long way from axes, but it doesn’t help. It just comes back. We nuked one once - or rather, a stubborn Freeborn general who wouldn’t listen to sense or reason or Navarri nuked one.”  
“It’s still there?”  
“And now it’s radioactive. You see why I can’t forget about this, Doctor. This is everything my nation stands for. This is what I’ve sworn to oppose and I can’t - I won’t - walk away from that.”

She looks round, because he’s silent, and he’s staring at her, looking old and tired and wary.  
“So are you a soldier?”  
“I’m a politician. I talk sense into magicians and make sure we stay out of war with the Realms. I work to keep the Empire together, because if it ever falls apart, we won’t be able to walk our Trods. That’s how I fight the Vallorn. By the word and the will, as they say of mages.”  
“You give the orders.”  
She smiles, because smiles communicate. “Now you’re thinking of us like Highborn. Do what this person says, because they’ve got the title and the shiny hat. We don’t work like that. I don’t give orders, and nobody would listen if I tried. We don’t have a hierarchy, we barely have leaders. A leader is just someone who’s being followed, and if you don’t like their decisions, you leave, and that is your right at every crossroad you come to. I can’t even give the Conclave orders. I can ask them for things, but they have to vote on it. The only thing the title gives me is responsibilities.”  
“Why ask for them?” He’s weighing her up. Back to the Merrow echoes, and she wishes he was consistent about which flavour of human he’s disconcertingly like. "Why take the title?”  
“Because I’m good at it. Because when it comes to dealing with the Realm of Day, I am damn good at what I do. Because I won't stand by and risk letting someone else cock it all up. Because it’s too important not to do it.”  
“Your lineage. Your magic. It’s dimensional energy. Your planet overlaps with other places and you’ve learned to manipulate them, I’ve no idea how. But if the Vallorn is a dimensional construct then it ought theoretically to be possible to just... move it. Take it out of your plane of existence, put it back where came from. Would that fulfil your oaths?”  
“Are you offering a trade?”  
“No, I’m offering to help. I don’t know how long it will take me to find your planet, but sooner or later, I will. And when I do, if I can, I’ll give you - give all of you - your home back.”

She closes her eyes and takes a deep, deep breath, because there’s no way to speak yet. She has to blink, and swallow, and stare at the sky, before she can be calm enough to tell him, “Thank you.”  
“And in the meantime - all of time and space?”  
She chokes on that, actually chokes, and she’s on her feet without remembering how she got there. “You didn’t tell me it travels in time.”  
“Oh, did I not? I thought I’d mentioned it.”  
“No. you didn’t.”  
“No, I knew I hadn’t.”  
“Was that a test?”  
“Of course. I don’t ask people to travel with me lightly. I needed to know who you were. Not just your name, your titles. I needed to know who, underneath all of that, Yvain is.”  
“Did I pass?”  
“I offered you the universe. Every star, every galaxy. And you still wanted to keep your promises first.” He stands, and for the first time, offers her his hand. “You’ll do.”


	4. Dreams in the Witch House

When they land again, she steps out onto damp flagstones, and the chill makes her glad she’s wearing long sleeves. The moon is full - no. One of the moons is full, and the other is a quarter of the way across the sky and behind the clouds. The buildings are tall, slender towers reaching up towards the sky, but they’re high up, perched on a wide landing, and most of the city is below them.

“Where are we?”  
“The Dreaming Spires of Khanaphes. Home of the Grand Opera. Why is it always the Grand Opera? Nobody ever calls it a Great Opera or a Magnificent Opera. It’s always Grand.”  
“Is it good?”  
“Bit overblown. Costumes are nice. But we’re not here for the opera, anyway.”  
“What are we here for?”  
“Fireworks.” His grin in the moonlight is joyful. She thinks of Varushkan wolves and doesn’t know why.  
“Fireworks?”  
“They have a competition with themselves. Every year, make a better New Year’s display than the last one. Well, they’ve been going for more than a century. Makes for a very good fireworks display, unless of course you don’t like explosions. What time is it? Forty minutes to midnight. Perfect. Come on!”

He leads her up from where they’ve landed, into the shadows around a tower and round into the light again. She looks over the railing, as interested in the architecture as in the promised fireworks, but something is missing.  
“Doctor?”  
“Keep up!”  
“Where is everyone?”  
“What?” He frowns, backtracks to stand beside her.  
“Fifteen minutes before an annual fireworks display? There’s no-one in the streets, every light is off. Silent, too. Something isn’t right.”  
“Apparently not.” He looks at her sideways. “Shall we find out what?”  
For once, her smile isn’t for anyone’s benefit but her own. “I never like to leave a mystery unsolved.”  
“Well then, Ygrain Worldscribe, let’s find a door.”

The doors aren’t hard to find, nor hard to open; heavy wooden things that creak on their hinges and have no locks worth speaking of. There are brackets for wooden bars, but nothing is in them. The first one they tried jammed completely at three inches wide, and torchlight showed them nothing but stone. The next complained and stuck, but gave under Yvain’s matter-of-fact shove.  
Inside, she doesn’t know what she expected, but this wasn’t it. The furniture is heavy, dark wood and velvet cushions, solid chests and embroidered tapestry, and it itches in her brain like she’s seen this before. The Doctor scans around the place.  
“Nothing,” he whispers, “nothing strange at all. It’s all perfectly normal.”  
“Then why are we whispering?”  
“Good question.”

The inner door leads to a stairwell, and they follow it down, the dizzying spiral taking them past doors and landings and tapestries. Yvain keeps her torchlight on the steps, until eventually the stairs give out and they’re in a long corridor, dark and bare.  
“Well,” she says, still whispering, “I can tell you two things wrong with this place.”  
“What?”  
“No lights. I’ve been looking. No electrics, no gas, no torch sconces, no candlesticks, no windows.”  
He spins around, looking at all the places she has, all the expanses of ceiling and wall where any species with eyes would need to put something to give themselves light.  
“Okay. I’ll grant you thing one. What’s thing two?”  
“No dust.”  
“So they like to be clean.”  
“Not limited dust, no dust. All those carved banisters on the landings? No dust. All the corners of the steps, no dust. Even the floors. These stones aren’t mortared in, but look at the cracks. Completely pristine. You couldn’t lay masonry that cleanly, let alone keep it that way.”  
“No lights. No dust. And do you notice something else?”  
“What?”  
“We’re still whispering, and there’s still nobody here but us. I wonder - what’s on the other side of these doors?”

He scans the nearest, the buzz very loud in the still air. He runs his fingers over the wood, around the edge, presses his ear to the door.  
“Doctor. One of the things you learn in my profession is how to recognise when something external is affecting your thoughts. I have an excessive sense of dread, and a very strong desire not to open that door.”  
“Me too.” He looks round at her, bares his teeth. “Shall we open it? Reckless, possibly very dangerous, but I don’t like having my thoughts messed with.”  
She straightens her spine against the fear creeping along it, and nods. “Let’s do it.”  
“Unless your profession tells you how to stop that feeling?”  
“Only by replacing it with different mess. Ready?”  
“On three.”  
She sets her hands flat against the wood, torch swinging loosely on its strap.  
“One.”  
He hides his screwdriver in his pocket and sets his hands above hers.  
“Two.”  
Neither of them is breathing. The fear presses in on them.  
“Three!”  
They push together, and the door swings silently open. Inside, there is blackness, and it rolls out to smother them like velvet.

When the moment passes, she is standing inside the doorway, back pressed to the wall, and the light from her torch shows her the Doctor, gripping the door with white fingers as though anchoring himself. “You okay?”  
She nods. “That was interesting.”  
“Interesting?”  
“Superpowers.”  
“Right, yes. Let me know if you feel the desire to scream.”  
She shines her light around the room. “It’s becoming tempting.”  
It is a cube of grey stone, windowless, featureless, apart from the door they’re still standing in, and it is filled with bodies. They lie sprawled on the floor, heads pillowed on their arms, and leaning half-sitting against the walls, and all their eyes are closed. He almost falls into the room, examining one after another with frantic energy.  
“They look like they’re sleeping.”  
“They’re not. No heartbeat, no breathing.”   
“So they’re all dead.”  
“Maybe. Maybe not.” The Doctor looks up at her, hollow-eyed. “They’re all still warm.”

She wants to back away, but the Doctor is still using her torchlight. She holds it steady and speaks instead. “What do you suppose is behind all the other doors?”  
“Now there’s a comforting thought. Is that always how you do your diplomacy?”  
“Yes, Doctor, surrounded by dead bodies in the dark is exactly how I do it. Can we help these people?”  
“Not by staying here.”  
He brushes off his knees and steps carefully out off the room, avoiding outflung hands and still limbs.

“Hypothesis,” she begins, as though she were trading philosophy with a Herald. “The sense of dread is intended to protect the secrets of whoever’s running this place.”  
“Deduction,” he follows, “they will be behind whichever door we least desire to open.”  
“I’m not feeling very keen on any of them.”  
“Alternative hypothesis: it’s static. It’s just the place, it doesn’t tell us anything.”  
“In which case we may as well open doors at random.”  
“Yours is better. Gives us a definite plan of action. So, which way don’t you want to go?”  
She looks around. She can hear both of them breathing, too loud and too fast, and it’s surprisingly hard to answer, knowing they’ll go exactly that way. “Further in.”  
“Me too. Further in, and further up - oh, that’s good.”  
“Why?”  
“If I just wanted to be near the exit, I’d be reluctant to go down.”

The first step is the hardest. After that, momentum helps her keep moving. After six doors, the corridor branches, and wordlessly they agree on left, and then left again, and then she is shining her torch up another staircase, spiralling into blackness.  
“At the top of the tallest tower,” she whispers, and he glares at her.  
“This isn’t a fairy story.”  
“I don’t know about fairies. But it is. This is someone’s idea of a haunted castle. No lights, because when you explore a haunted castle it’s always dark inside. No dust, because you don’t mention it in stories. No windows, because we’re in a dungeon.”  
“And all the bodies?”  
“Not sure about that part.”  
“And all the doors, that I’ve suddenly noticed have opened behind us?”

She turns around, slowly, she doesn’t dare to move fast, and all the rooms are standing open, black empty eyes in the black empty corridors. “Are all the bodies still lying down?”  
“Do you want to go and look?”  
“I really, really don’t.” They’re pressed against the wall, cold stone at their backs. “I’m definitely feeling the urge to scream now.”  
“The story’s changed. It was keeping us out. Now it’s driving us in.” He can’t keep still, staring into the darkness, trying to watch everywhere at once. It’s not empty now, it’s alive, that darkness, creeping in on them, pouring out from open doors, and the silence holds more than just their voices.  
“Can you hear footsteps?”  
“I can’t hear breathing.”   
Something warm touches her hand, and she freezes, until he steps closer and it can’t possibly be anyone’s hand but his.   
“We have to go up the stairs.”  
She wants to speak, but there aren’t any words coming, and the blackness is trying to find a way inside her.  
“Hey. Hey. Look at me. I know. But up the stairs is the only way we’ve got. We’re going to go up, and we’re not going to look back. We're just going to run. Okay?”

She squeezes his hand, and pushes herself away from the wall, and holds on for dear life, and nods, just once.  
“See, that’s why they put you in charge. One... two... three!”  
She almost, almost trips on the first stair, and she can feel something grabbing at her ankle, but then she’s up again and moving, and they climb and climb, panting and scrambling, and the footsteps rise behind them like the hungry tide.

The stairs go on forever, but she counts the landings, yawning empty caverns reaching out to swallow her, and it’s six floors up when they run out of steps. She can’t help herself; she turns back to shine the light down the stairs.  
“Nothing there.”  
“Nothing here, either.” He’s panting, leaning against the banister - still no dust - and his eyes are as wide as hers feel. “Just one last door.” He looks straight up, and she follows with the torch. “Pointed ceiling. Top of the tower. End of the road.”  
She sets her shoulders back, stands up straight, not because she isn’t scared, but because she’ll never do anything if she doesn’t do it now. “Well then. Let’s find out how this story goes.”

They move on the door together, and the room beyond blazes with light.


	5. Dreamscape of the Endless Hunt

The tower chamber is as sumptuous as the dungeons were bare. The walls are the same grey stone, but they’re hardly visible under acres of tapestry. The embroidery glows, hunting scenes and bright flowers and what look like religious figures all jumbled together on the walls. The floor is carpeted in sheepskins, and Yvain winces at the idea of them under her hardly clean boots. Golden silk flutters in front of a single arched window, turning the sun rich and warm as it pours in. A single chest stands against one wall, carved and polished; a single bed stands against another, a tall four-postered thing with velvet curtains drawn close.

“Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair,” the Doctor says aloud.  
“Who’s Rapunzel?”  
“Well, out of the two of us, probably you.”  
“Okay, but - who’s Rapunzel?”  
He looks startled. “You really don’t know? The Princess in the Tower, rescued by the gallant knight, who fights his way into the castle.”  
“Alright, we’re the gallant knights. We’ve proved our courage, we’ve made it this far. What do we do now?”  
“No, that is not the question. Humans, you’re always asking the wrong questions. It’s a wonder you ever made it into space.” He’s stalking around as he talks, and she plays along, looking at the tapestries and the locked chest as though she hasn’t seen what he’s doing. “You’ve all got brains made of pudding, that’s the trouble. You haven’t got room to think of the right questions, like: who’s in the bed?”  
He throws back the velvet curtains, and the figure on the silken sheets is pale as death.

She doesn’t gasp, or scream, or fall to her knees. She just walks over, steps around the Doctor, and sits by the body of her lover.  
“This is the princess?”  
“This is Joshua Scions of Atun,” she says quietly, and takes his still hand in hers. He is white against his dress tunic, his surcoat of midnight blue, with the silver badge of his chapter on his breast and the circlet he never wanted on his forehead. “Except that Joshua never went into space. Never slept on silk sheets, and certainly not with his boots on... It’s the roses of Astolat.”  
“You’ve lost me there.”  
“In Astolat, in the gardens of Spiral Castle, there grow roses. The scent of those roses is different for everyone who breathes it, and always calls to mind your first love.”  
“Real roses.”  
“Well, I think the Summer realm’s probably involved, but-”  
“No, out the window. Over the whole city. Climbing roses. It’s not Rapunzel, it’s Sleeping Beauty, and the next page is when someone kisses the princess.”  
“Seriously? He’s not my lover, he’s the man I turned down. I can’t just kiss him in his sleep.”  
“He’s not sleeping. He’d be breathing if he were asleep. And if it makes you feel any better, he’s probably not real.”  
She sighs. “And he’d probably prefer me kissing him than not, under the circumstances.”  
“Let’s hope so.” The Doctor sits on the windowsill, in among the billowing folds of the curtain, and reaches out to pluck a huge, blood red rose. He buries his face in it, and closes his eyes tight, and she’s never going to ask him about who he’s seeing, so she turns to the statue that might - or might not - be Castellan Joshua, and kisses him gently on the lips.

The first thing that happens is blackness. All the glorious sunlight vanishes, and they are left blinking in the dark. Something that might not be a hand is snatched from Yvain’s grasp and she moves by memory, putting her back to the wall, listening for the Doctor’s movements on the suddenly bare floor.  
“Nice trick!” he calls into the dark, “very impressive. You okay, Yvain?”  
“Still here.” Her eyes are starting to adjust. “Also, an ushabti.”  
“Well, hello there, good to meet you! Aren’t you clever! How were you hiding?” He dances over, back in his element, and scans the shadowy figure, blue lights and steel gleaming in smooth curves, faceless and polished. But his face falls again, and he glares at his screwdriver. “Nothing. Nothing, nothing. Not real.”  
“Different story?”  
“Or something.”

Something knocks on the door. Heavy hands and heavy footsteps, climbing the stairs after them, scraping over the stones. She’s turning to look at the door when the ushabti moves, barely more than arm’s reach away, and she hears the snick of knives being drawn.  
It’s on the wrong side of the block that used to be a bed, but it’s moving fast, and she doesn’t think sweet reason is going to help. “Doctor!”  
“Can you climb?”  
“Rose vines!”  
“Exactly!” He grins widely, and she doesn’t stop to debate; she’s out the window and moving sideways, clinging to the blue-lit cables that tangle and creep across the wall. The doctor follows her, his boots slipping on the cables, but she grabs at his hand and they’re steady again.  
“Is it following us?”  
“You want to stay here and find out? We need to get off this tower. The dream might change again, and I’m not sure these cables are real!”

It’s a mad scramble through the dark, but it’s almost reassuring. At least she has something to do. And she’s definitely the better climber - several times she has to find a new set of footholds for him, because his hips don’t bend like hers. She decides there’s no point being squeamish, and moves his feet for him, shoving them onto the right holds without tenderness. He doesn’t complain, so she keeps helping, and by the time they reach a solid stone landing she’s calm again.

The Doctor takes one look up, and starts running.  
They circle down the next tower. The blue-lit cables light their way, outlining the whole city in ghostly coils. “This isn’t my story!”  
“No!” he shouts back, over the storm of footsteps following, “it’s mine!”

She looks back, which might have been a mistake, because now she knows what it looks like to be chased by hundreds of identical ushabti, wrapped in dark steel, barely visible except where they shine painfully bright between the plates of their armour. She almost collides with the Doctor when she turns back, because he’s flinging open a door, and there are more of them coming the other way, driving them through the doorway, and the Doctor barely gets the door’s electronics to close it again in time. They lean panting on the door, until the robots fling themselves against the thin metal, and she jerks back reflexively.

She tries to catch her breath. “Doctor. Is any of this real?”  
“Real death if they catch us. Apart from that - no, this is, this is a dream, someone is imagining this and we’re caught up in the story.”  
“We’re shaping it. The princess in the tower, the roses of Astolat, Joshua in his uniform - either someone knew exactly who would come along, or it’s responding to us.”  
“And not to what we would like it to be. To how we know, deep down, the story goes.”  
“You said this was your story. It has been all along, I don’t know any stories about kissing sleeping people in towers. So tell me, in your story, Doctor, what happens next?”  
“We get captured.”

The world dissolves around them, and they’re standing not in a room of rusting pipes and grease, nor one of dark stone and tapestry, but one of sleek metal and glass. The floor is carpeted, and outside the windows she can see the city dark and silent again against the moonlit clouds.  
“I don’t understand.” They’re standing safely in an empty room, and the Doctor looks - frustrated. “There should be a monster. That’s how this goes, there’s a monster, a villain, a plan. It doesn’t just go away before I’ve solved it.”  
“Well, I think you might still have something to solve.”  
“What?” He follows her gaze, and goes still.  
“The ushabti were the people, and they’ve still not woken up.”

The crowds that chased them here have turned away, and now they drift past the windows, heading downward. The streets are full of them, when they get to the parapet to look; quiet, shuffling figures, walking through their private visions, never speaking, eyes blank and unfocused.  
“What happened here?”  
“Dream state. Induce a dream state across the whole populace of a city, what would happen then? Nothing. Without something to react to they’d just have their own dreams, they’d ignore each other. Then we come along. We’re not part of the plan. What happens? The dream shapes itself around us. But if it’s a universal dreamstate field, why weren’t we affected directly?”  
“We were. That aura of dread.”  
“Ohh. Feedback loop. We did it to ourselves. As soon as we felt even a little bit afraid, the effects magnified. So the question now is - take a guess.”  
“What’s meant to be happening.”  
“Specifically, what’s meant to happen at firework time?”  
“If it’s a field, then it’s being broadcast. Can we trace it back?”  
“Yesss. Now we’ve broken out of the dream, I can see the real readings. I think. Follow the people, they’re heading towards the centre.”

They move faster than the silent crowds, slipping between the shuffling dreamers. For a bizarre moment she thinks of moving quickly around Anvil, and the figures around her are not Khanaphir but Urizeni mages, looking disapproving at her lack of poise. She grits her teeth and traces her tattoo of Ophis, fingers circling on her wrist over and over, thinking _revelation_ until the figures fade back into sleep-walking locals.  
Ahead, the Doctor slows down to look at them, and she realises he saw the same change. “That was me! Sorry, fixed it now!”  
“How?”  
“Hearth magic.”  
“I have no idea what you just said. We’re not out of the woods yet, keep moving!”

The main square is packed with people, and they have to force a way through, shouldering past the dreamers to the bare space in the centre.  
“This empty space. It’s not empty, is it?”  
“I very much doubt it.” He fiddles with his ubiquitous screwdriver, and reluctantly the cloaking fades away, revealing a squat, spidery machine. “There it is. Brainwave broadcaster. Solar powered, but it’s almost dead, it must have taken years to charge up enough for this. Intention controlled, it must have been here unnoticed, charging up slowly, tuning in to the crowds. So why today?”  
“Expectation.”  
“Yes, of course. Fireworks, new year, everyone expecting something exciting, something new, something to happen, this thing obliges.”  
“How did it get here?”  
“I think... I think it was put here, like a statue. Nobody realised it had enough functionality left to charge itself up. Just an accident.”  
“Can you shut it down?”  
“It’s almost dead. Its innards are all corroded. I can turn it off, but I can’t change the frequency. If I shut it down like this, those people won’t wake up, they’ll stay like this until they starve. We’ve got to send a wake-up signal through the machine.” He frowns. “On the way down, just now, you almost slipped under.”  
“Sorry about that.”  
“No, that’s not the point. You woke up again. You did something to yourself to stay in the real world, what was it?”  
“Hearth magic.”  
“That different from ordinary magic?”  
“Yes. Long story, but -” She bares her left wrist for him, shows him the dark red tattoo. “This is Ophis, the rune of revelation. It stands for, or calls out, or embodies - truth. Reality. It’s the bright lantern that burns away illusions.”  
“What did you do with it?”  
“Invoked it. I concentrated on it really hard.”  
“That’s it? You concentrated on it?”  
“I’m good at concentrating. It’s the foundational skill of all magic.”

He pulls a panel off the machine and starts pulling out wires, splicing together a makeshift new circuit. “And you’re a very good magician, aren’t you?”  
“Oh, there are probably at least fifty Day mages as good as me.”  
He glares at her. “In the universe.”  
“Yes. So yes, I am an excellent magician.”  
He presses wires into her hands. “Good. When I flip this switch, you’ll be in control of the machine. Everything it broadcasts will go through you. If you do what you did before, if you concentrate as hard as you can on reality, they should wake up. Ready?”  
“Um - yes.”

She was expecting counting, but he just flips the switch, and a jolt goes through her like static. It stings and burns and she very much wants to let go, take herself out of the circuit - but she has taken oaths and she lets them carry her into the task. She focuses, focuses, draws herself in, into the pure clear stillness she needs when she casts rituals, and she thinks: revelation.  
The rune blazes before her eyes, golden as the sunlight. Then there is shouting, screaming, and the circuit goes dead in her hands, and the Doctor is catching her before she can fall.  
“Did it work?”  
“Yeah. Yeah, it worked. They’re all awake. Pretty freaked out, but they’re all okay. You did it.”  
She pants, gets her feet under her. She is not going to faint in his arms. “Oh. Good.”

***

“Here we are. New Years Eve in Kanaphes, the one hundred and thirty-first annual fireworks display.”  
“Well, last year’s was me, so they don’t have much to beat.”  
“Oh, I think they’ll manage it.” He hesitates. “That was meant to be a compliment.”  
“Intention accepted.”  
The first lights flare overhead, and she leans back against the parapet to watch gold and red and green bursting in the sky.  
They must make an odd pair, him with his sober black, tall and angular, and her broad and stocky in her sensible forest colours, with the fireworks sparking reflections in every fishscale on her cheeks. She tilts her head to look at him, without losing sight of the display, and sure enough he’s looking back through shadowed eyes.  
“Do you do this a lot?”  
“Do what?”  
“Get into trouble.”  
“Sometimes it finds me. Sometimes I go looking for it. Is that a problem?”  
She does him the courtesy of thinking about it, while the fireworks turn suddenly purple and draw an unguarded smile from them both. “Do you ever just run?”  
“Never,” he says instantly, “not while there’s a chance. I always try. I can’t always save everyone. Be nice if I could.”  
“And when you can’t?”  
“Save what I can. Try not to look back.”  
“No.”  
He looks full at her, looks distressed, and maybe his attention span isn’t quite as good as she assumed.  
“No, it’s not a problem,” and he relaxes, leans back against the wall beside her.  
The fireworks are very, very good.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am beginning to feel bad about subjecting the world to this. Then I remember that the world is a grown-up and perfectly capable of not reading things it doesn't want to, and post chapters anyway. Tune in next week for allies, adventures, aliens and the course of true love, which never did run smooth.


	6. Knights of Glory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Doctor folds his arms. “I’m only taking this seriously because you can do magic,” he warns. “Is reincarnation a generally accepted theory?”

“So, where to next?” the Doctor asks, and Yvain stares at him in genuine confusion. “We’ve got the whole universe to choose from. Anything you’d really like to see?”  
“I... I have no way of answering that question.”  
“Course you don’t. You have no idea what’s in the universe. So how about we try something.” He pets the console gently, like soothing an ox, and looks round at her. “I’ve got an idea about getting you home. Probably won’t work, but a step is a step. Come here.”  
She sets the book she’d found back on the shelf and comes down to the console. “Okay. What do I do?”  
“Give me your hands.”

He guides her hands into the bank of honeycombed plastic. It’s softer than she would have thought, and slick. The lights shift under her touch.  
“Telepathic circuits. I’m trying to trace back your own timeline. Almost certainly won’t take us where you’d expect, but if the Tardis can get a good look at you, we might have some idea where you’ve spent most of your time.”  
“Do I need to do anything?”  
“Just hold still. You’re not flying her, I’m just using you as a... compass. Well, that’s not right.”  
“What are you seeing?”  
“The Tardis has found something, but it’s about six hundred years in the future. Seems unlikely to be your point of origin, unless you fell a long way back through time when you showed up. You can take your hands out now.”

The circuits cling to her, until she tries to think at them and ask them to let go. That seems to work, and she adds another thing to the list of things she’ll never get him to explain about how this ship works. It is a worryingly long list. She could probably be content doing nothing for the rest of her life but learning about the Tardis.  
“Coordinates locked in. Let’s see where this takes us.” The Tardis burbles and screeches, briefly - Yvain's’s still not used to how brief the actual travelling is - and clangs with arrival. She’s almost sure that final clunk is just an alarm, a sort of _look at me, I got you there_ noise. The Doctor checks the nearest screen. “In orbit around Jassaco Six. Probably a space station. Artificial gravity, atmosphere looks good. Shall we have a look?”

A space station, apparently, is a lot like a set of corridors, but if you unfocus your eyes slightly you can see them curving downwards around the curve of the station and it’s fascinating. She almost gets left behind, until she explains what she’s doing, and he gives her a sufficiently scornful look that she gives up trying to estimate the radius. “Why here? What does the Tardis think I have to do with this place?”  
“Good question. No idea. Must be something, though. You must be connected to someone, or maybe something that’s going to happen, on board this station. The Tardis is never wrong, although sometimes she is obscure. I think she does it to improve my character. Ah, now we’re getting somewhere!”

They pass out of the corridors into what must be the core of the station, high ceilinged and lined with little shops, thronging with people. Most of them are human, but Yvain’s eyes catch on the few who aren’t - a trio over there who are too broad with bright red pebbly skin, a lone shopkeeper with a beak.  
The Doctor is saying something about keeping her eyes open for anyone who might be connected to her planet, but “I’ve found them.”  
“You have?”  
“On the balcony, drinking coffee.”  
“Who?”  
“In the uniforms with the fox badges.”  
“Are you sure?”  
“Clothes are strange, but most of them have masks pushed up on their heads and one of them is a changeling - I’m pretty sure they’re League mercenaries, but unless antlers are common outside of my world I think it’s worth a try.”  
“Woah, slow down. We’re not going to go rushing up to them. We’re going to explore a bit. Look casual. Do a little shopping.”  
“Doctor. Two of them are staring.”  
“No, we’re just checking out the scenery. Perfectly normal, nothing interesting about us.”  
“Doctor, I’m sparkly.”  
“Yeah. They’ve probably noticed that.”  
“Mhmm. So perhaps the obvious merrow should go and introduce herself?”  
“Don’t get carried away now. No flirting.”

There’s a moving staircase up to the balcony, which she doesn’t have time to analyse properly but must be using a continuous belt system to work at all, and then the fox-badges are waving her over. She reminds herself not to mention time travel if she can help it, and joins them gladly, leaning on the nearer of their several tables as though she belonged.  
“Evening, stranger. Foxes of Tassato, fighting with the Silent Tide. Buy you a drink?” The speaker is the changeling, taller than her, with elegantly curved antlers. He’s really quite pretty, and of course he knows it, look at the way he’s standing.  
“Yvain Worldscribe, just passing through. This is the Doctor, my travelling companion. And if you’re buying - I’ll take tea, thank you.”  
The changeling smirks, and holds out a warm hand. “Luis de Tassato. Good to see a new face. Not much traffic this close to the border. These reprobates are the Banner of the Red Fox, don’t believe anything Gabriella tells you and don’t trust the booze.”  
She shakes his hand gladly. “Which one’s Gabriella?”  
“The one with the copper scales who’s trying to get you into bed.”  
“Nice to meet you,” Yvain calls, and waves. The Foxes laugh, and someone hands her tea. Gabriella pouts.  
“I am not trying to get her into bed.”  
“Pretty female merrow, Gabriella.”  
“I’m still sleeping off the last one.”  
The Doctor shakes Yvain’s shoulder. “Hey. No flirting, remember, I said. You, antlers, you said there’s a war on?”

The temperature drops several degrees, and several Foxes pull down their masks; Yvain turns on the Doctor and backs him bodily into a railing.  
“Point one. You are not in charge. Point two. You will not make Lineage jokes. You will not mention fish or antlers or bark or snakes.”  
“I didn’t mean anything by it,” he splutters, “it’s his most distinctive feature -”  
“And yours is being an ignorant foreigner, but you needn’t flaunt it. If you don’t care to have a civilised conversation, I’m sure you can find something else to occupy your time.” She stares him down, until he scowls, and straightens his coat irritably.  
“I’ll see you later,” he snaps, and stalks off like an affronted tarantula. 

She watches long enough to be certain he’s actually going somewhere, and takes a deep breath. Damage control. She turns back to Luis, open regret on her face. “I apologise for that rudeness, good Foxes. I have no wish to quarrel.”  
Gabriella pushes her mask back up. She’s round and friendly-looking, brows dusted with bright scales and fangs giving her the slightest of lisps. “What’s a pretty girl like you doing with an ass like that?”  
Yvain rolls her eyes. “Reconsidering my life choices.”  
There’s appreciative laughter from the bravos, and the tension’s not gone, but it’s defused; she’s not about to be turned out of the conversation now. “But we have been away from news for a while.” She lets her smile drop away to seriousness. “How are things looking on the front?”  
Luis nods slowly. “Pretty bad. We haven’t lost anywhere, but it’s been two years since any of the armies could be spared for recuperation. They’re wearing ragged. The Silent Tide are bound by common cause this season, we’re here trying to shore them up, but it’s a losing battle.”  
She frowns at her tea, asks softly, “Are we going to lose this territory?”  
“Depends where the Vanem concentrate their push, but yeah. We’re going to lose somewhere. We’re stretched too thin. The Hounds of Glory should have been making a push for the next system, but they were never deployed.”

Yvain stares. Gabriella comes around the tables and props herself up next to them. This is obviously a conversation they’ve had a dozen times, and a new face is an excuse to return to a favourite subject.  
“Yes, really,” says Gabriella bitterly, “the Hounds are sitting around on homeworld getting fat, while the Silent Tide and the Marchers get shredded.”  
“Well,” Yvain says thoughtfully, “do you know any cardinals?”  
“Won’t help,” Gabriella groans, and lets her head thud down on the table. “She’s unrevokeable, didn’t you hear?”  
“Oh, no. The Senators didn’t?”  
“Yup. Re-elected General bloody Rosata de bloody Rondell, and now we’re all stuck with her.”  
“Can’t the Council of Nine revoke a re-elected general? I can’t remember if the law allows for that -”  
“Oh, yeah, in theory,” says Luis, “but the Council is deadlocked. Half the Cardinals don’t want their jobs and the other half are trying to keep the Dawnish on side. We’re going to be stuck with de Rondell until the throne removes her, and that could take years. I think the Senators are waiting for Britta to reincarnate before they elect anyone.”  
“It was ever thus.”  
“Could be worse though,” Gabriella says, “there’s a planet two systems over, in the Alliance, that has a hereditary monarchy.”  
“Hereditary?”  
“Yup.”  
“But how does that even work? What do you do if you get a bad one? Do they still get to choose their successor if you have to get rid of them?”  
“That’s just it, they can’t get rid of them. The throne serves until death, and then the next monarch is the nearest living relative. Sometimes they have revolutions, but then they just give the throne to someone else and they start passing it down to their kids. It’s bizarre. They’ve got this real thing about bloodlines controlling your destiny.”  
“We can always count on Gabriella to tell us cheerful stories like this, and remind us that an interregnum is not the worst thing in the universe. Your friend’s back.”  
He looms behind Yvain’s shoulder, and she half turns to look at him. He’s not cross any more - he’s worried.  
“Found something?”  
“I think you should take a look at this. If you can be spared?”  
Luis flaps a hand at them politely, but Gabriella grins. “As long as you bring her back tonight.”

“Why does she want you back tonight? Have you made plans? Is it something important?”  
“What? Oh, Gabriella. No, she just wants to sleep with me.”  
“Seriously?”  
“I think casually, actually.”  
“Well, good. That is good, isn’t it? Do you think that’s good?”  
“Relax. I’m not insulted. And I’m not planning to sleep with Gabriella. What about your thing, is that important?”  
“Possibly. I’ve been looking through their computer systems, see if I can get a better idea of why the Tardis brought us here. They take DNA scans of everyone who comes on board, mostly out of paranoia, but it’s useful for us because their security is just not a match for me. So I ran some scans. I thought maybe somebody here was your descendant, that would explain why your timelines were connected.”  
“And you found someone?”  
“No, that’s just it. Nobody here is any relative to you. You might have cousins in common a few generations back, but nothing worth speaking of. But while I was looking, I found this.”

He fiddles with an advertisement set into the wall, and persuades the screen to show her twelve seconds of looping, grainy footage.  
“What am I looking at?”  
“The boss of those, ah, people upstairs. This is Senator Felice de Regario. No relative. Notice anything?”  
She leans in, watching the stocky figure on the screen. It’s not immediately familiar, but as the footage loops, she begins to see it. A face with familiar proportions. A way of standing, with her weight on one side. “We could be sisters.”  
“That’s what I thought. So I ran a voice analysis. You’ve got different accents, and she doesn’t have scales, which is probably why those idiots upstairs didn’t notice anything, but apart from that, you match.”  
“She’s me.”  
“Except she can’t be. The DNA proves it, you two have nothing in common. Except that you look like twins, and with a little vocal coaching, you could impersonate each other perfectly. So how does that happen? She must be who the Tardis brought us to see, that’s obvious. But who is she?”

Yvain swallows, watching the footage loop again. “She’s me.”  
“No, I’ve just told you, she isn’t.”  
“No, not - she’s not _this_ me, in this body. But if we’re not related, and we’re not duplicates, there’s only one answer left.” She reaches out to touch the screen, as though she could make her own ghost tangible. “I’m her past life. She’s me, reincarnated. She doesn’t need to share my genes. She shares my soul.”  
The Doctor folds his arms. “I’m only taking this seriously because you can do magic,” he warns. “Is reincarnation a generally accepted theory?”  
“Every human culture I know of understands it to some extent. And before you say that’s not evidence, we’ve also proven it with science.”  
“Ohhh. That’s very interesting. What did you do?”  
“There is a substance called Liao which is used to have effects upon souls. There is a rare form of that substance called True Liao and if taken correctly, it gives visions. Visions of being someone else in some other time. Information from those visions has been verified by archaeology. Things the people having the visions couldn’t possibly have known or faked - things like, those half-buried ruins have a carving like this around the base, and when you dig it up for the first time in hundreds of years, the carving’s there.”  
“That’s a very interesting result. Of course, it doesn’t prove that you’re actually being reincarnated. You might just have a very interesting drug.”  
“I am not a theologian.”  
“What? What? All that curiosity, and you just swallow what you’re told about religion? That is frankly irresponsible.”  
“I let other curious people do the religious thinking, take records of all the visions, trace the past lives, experiment on getting better information out of them. There is not time to do everything. The price Flavia pays to record every vision and talk to every visionary is never going to Conclave because she is always busy. There isn’t time. So I believe what Flavia tells me about the nature of souls, and she believes what I tell her about politics with Eternals. I’m not swallowing anything. I am wise enough to know when I am ignorant.”  
“Sorry, Archmage.”  
She winces. “Don’t call me that where they can hear me, please?”  
“Why not? They won’t suspect anything, you’re not anyone in this timeline. It’s a nickname.”  
“Except that I’ve got part of the Archmage’s regalia hidden under my tunic.”  
“What? What? Why?”  
“In case it comes in useful.”  
“Why would it come in useful?”  
Yvain looks at him wearily. “It makes Day rituals easier. But there’s only meant to be one in existence at a time, and the Senator at least ought to recognise it, so I’m not keen on flashing it around.”  
“So in your timeline, they haven’t got one?”  
“No. No chain and no belt. They should still have the staff, I hope, because I don’t, but it’s arguably the least useful part of the set.”  
“What do they - No, never mind, shut up. Don’t care how your magic works, it’s not important.”  
“What is important right now, Doctor?”  
“That.” 

He adjusts the screen again, and now it doesn’t show the Senator walking endlessly towards a ship, but the same shuttle racing up from the planet below, and a mass of dark ships slipping out from the disk of the sun.  
“Recognise them?”  
“No, but I’ve got a fair guess. That’s either an Imperial army, or it’s an invasion force.”  
“Lesson one about soldiers. Never assume they’re on your side.”  
“Is this real time?”  
“...No. This is about half an hour ago.”  
The station shakes underfoot, rings like a bell. The Doctor grins. “That’s real time. We’ve got visitors!”  
They take off through the corridors.


	7. Merciless Wrath of the Reaver

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Thank you for your cooperation. This station is now under the protection of the Vanem Alliance. We apologise for any disruption to your evening plans."

The run is short, confusing and pointless. The soldiers from Vanem - their chest badges are on the right, and show only a pink rectangle with five white stripes - herd everyone on the station into the main concourse, barking voices coming not from their opaque helmets but from speakers strapped to their shoulders. The lights flicker, the PA system howls, and then all the advertisements and staircases stop moving.  
“They’ve shut off the generators. We’re running on backup power. Life support only. Why would they do that?”

A Vanem soldier in a darker blue uniform stamps past the line of blank-helmeted guards penning them in - not many of them, maybe three hundred on this whole station, this really isn’t the place to be a tourist right now - and pushes up her visor. She almost looks like an orc, to Yvain’s eyes, if orcs had spines on their cheekbones. Her eyes are bright orange, and she is smiling.

“Thank you for your cooperation,” she rasps, and Yvain hears it doubled by the speaker on her shoulder - it must be translating, but the Tardis is giving her the meaning both times. “This station is now under the protection of the Vanem Alliance. We apologise for any disruption to your evening plans. You will all be required to show papers. Neutral parties will be escorted to their ships, where you will be locked in. Imperial citizens will remain here as our guests. When we are satisfied that all threats have been dealt with, the rest of you will be permitted to leave. Please try not to panic, as it will only slow things down. Have your papers ready. Attempts to escape will be met with deadly force.”

The Foxes, led by a hard-faced Gabriella, push their way through the crowd in a wedge. When they reach the Vanem leader, they stand to attention, silently. Every mask is pulled down, the bright red embroidery incongruous next to the identical helmets of the Vanem, and far more human.  
The Vanem leader smiles wider. “Ah. So good of you to show yourselves, that will simplify things. Guards, put these scum over there and keep an eye on them. Oh - and disarm them.” She smirks at Gabriella, who doesn’t turn her head as she leads the Foxes to the indicated corner. Several of them are already burned by Vanem laser fire, and Luis moves about them with bandages and salves.  
“That’s very cooperative,” the Doctor mutters to Yvain, “aren’t they soldiers?”  
“Clever soldiers. Overwhelming force, civilians everywhere.”  
“So they’re going to surrender?”  
“I very much doubt that.”

The soldiers are passing people through fairly quickly and pointing them off into little groups - apparently they don’t have the numbers to escort them to their ships individually and are doing it in sets. There are still a lot of soldiers. Yvain can see fifty-odd, or about half a Conclave Order's worth, which is the easiest mental yardstick she has for dozens of people, and there might be others in the corridors. Surprise attack, by a skirmish force. This is probably a minor outpost.  
Yvain reaches the front of the line, and the Vanem holds out a hand. “Papers.” She’s still trying to think of a plausible story when the Vanem’s head turns in a manner consistent with staring at her scales, and the speakers issues a snort that sounds very much like laughter. “Yeah, don’t bother mate. Over with the other Imperials, get on with it.”  
“Why’d you do that?” The Doctor says to the soldiers. “She’s not a soldier.”  
“She’s an Imperial. Papers, please.”   
Silence. Yvain keeps walking, straining her ears.  
“Never mind my papers. I’m with her, and I’m not leaving without her.”  
“Fine. We’ve got another one,” the soldier calls out, and Yvain hears the Doctor being shoved in her direction. Stupid, stupid.

They sit against the wall, hands in their laps where the guards can see them.  
“That was a stupid thing to do,” she hisses at him, and he looks offended.  
“Well, I wasn’t going to leave you behind, was I?”  
“You don’t think you’d have had a better chance of helping from outside the prison cell?”  
“Not if I’d been locked onto one of the other ships, no, and I don’t think they’d have taken me to the blue box in one of the corridors.”  
She hesitates for a moment. “Thank you.”  
Gabriella crouches beside them. “Nice to see a friendly face. I don’t suppose you’ve got any clever tricks up your sleeves?”  
“Well, this one’s full of clever ideas, but not always at the right moment. What’s your plan?”  
“Go down fighting.”   
“Nice,” the Doctor says grimly, “got the benefit of simplicity.”  
“We learnt that off you lot."  
"My lot?"  
"Highborn. These Vanem, they’re always having internicine wars, and when they get captured they just turn coats. Well, of course, the first Imperials they ever fought wouldn’t be turned, and they couldn’t get their heads round it. Our girls took down dozens of them before they realised we wouldn’t soldier for them. So now they kill every Imperial they find, and we make it hard for them. The only reason we’re not dead already is that they like to let the neutrals go, to spread the word of Vanem victory, and shooting us on sight might cause a panic.”  
“Great, nice story. Where’s your boss?”  
“I’m sorry? I’m in charge here.”  
“Doctor, shut up. Gabriella, we know who you travelled here with. We also know she left, and we’re not going to ask why because there are guards listening, isn’t that right, Doctor?”  
“Right. Yes. Good point.”  
Luis calls Gabriella away, and the Foxes gather into a little huddle, discussing tactics or saying goodbye, whatever a band of bravos does in the face of certain death. The Vanem are leading the harried groups of neutrals off to their ships, and it’ll soon be the best moment to rush the guards.  
“You do remember,” says the Doctor quietly, “what else we saw on that screen?”  
“Of course I do. Do you suppose they caught that ship?”  
“I think that’s very, very likely. What are you going to do if you meet yourself?”  
“I have no idea.”

The Vanem leader approaches - standing, sensibly, outside the ring of guards. “Good evening. Since you are Imperials, we won’t be offering you quarter.”  
“We’re civilians,” the Doctor interrupts, clambering to his feet. Yvain thinks longingly about her staff, lost somewhere in the mists of history.   
“Not my problem. All Imperials are to be executed, those are my orders. You in the Fox masks! Good news, you have a chance to be of use to the Vanem Alliance. Your commanding officer has been captured and holds high Imperial rank. You will be helping her to cooperate with our interrogation. In the meantime, you will be confined here. Attempts to rebel will be met with sublethal force and you will be made to regret the attempt. When you're ready, ladies.”  
Three of her soldiers have been setting down a ring of hemispherical devices behind the guards, and now the guards step back and blue light flickers through the air as they pass.  
“Forcefield,” the Doctor says in disgust. “Of course. Wouldn’t want to waste any manpower on us.”  
Two of the guards stay, but the rest follow their commander out of the concourse and out of sight. The Foxes try to push their way through the forcefield, but the energy crackles through them like static; they get nothing but shocked for their trouble.

The Doctor steps over to the windows and stares out, apparently fascinated by the drifting of stars past the gently spinning metal. Yvain joins him.  
“Got any bright ideas?”  
“One. Depends on someone distracting those guards. Not for long.”  
“Company of League bravos? They can do distracting.”  
He grimaces. “Not yet. I want to get your... the Senator out as well. Don’t know where she’s being kept yet.”  
“You think they’ll bring her here?”  
“...Maybe not.”  
“How big is this station?”  
“What are you thinking?”  
“Two guards, nine bravos. If you can take down the forcefields, they can deal with the guards. Not necessarily before the guards can call for help, but fast enough that we could move.”  
The Doctor considers it, the stars reflected in his eyes.  
“Can’t move nine soldiers around this station quietly.”  
“Can’t fight past more than about three Vanem with the available forces.”  
“There’ll be more than three if they bring the Senator here.”  
“And if they don’t bring the Senator here, we may as well act now before anyone else gets hurt.”  
“What are you two planning?” It’s Luis, leaning over her, keeping his voice soft and conversational.  
She glances at the Doctor. “He can take down the forcefields, but there’s too many of us to move around the station without being seen.”  
“Two guards. We could handle them,” Luis says, “let ourselves get recaptured - probably hurt a bit, but it’d get you two free. Can you get off-station if we do?”  
The Doctor nods slowly. “We weren’t planning on just leaving.”  
“Well, you should. You’re civilians, it’s our job to keep you safe.”  
“And the Senator?”  
“Won’t betray the Empire whatever happens to us. We were dead the minute the Vanem boarded, don’t worry about us.”  
The Doctor gawps, but he doesn’t have an answer, he closes his mouth and looks away. Yvain holds out a hand, which doesn’t tremble, and Luis shakes it. “See you next time around,” she says, and he grins.   
“Buy me a drink next time around.”  
“Deal.”


	8. Circle of Trust

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Let me tell you what we know. We know that threatening your life will not make you cooperate. We know that threatening your person will not make you cooperate and three of your high-ranking officers have killed themselves rather than risk breaking under torture. We know that you have a fanatical obsession with your fellow soldiers.”  
> “We call that part loyalty."

Luis whispers in Gabriella’s ear, and she speaks to the next two, and it’s seconds before they have all the distraction they need. The bravos gather on the point nearest the guards and shout obscenities, beating their hands on the forcefield, and the guards take the bait, shouting back to demand silence and order them to sit down. The Doctor flashes his screwdriver at two of the hemispheres, getting a feel for how they work inside, and then he waves it at the rest and the whole thing flashes red and vanishes. The bravos surge forward, expecting it, and the guards go down under the simple weight of bodies.

The Doctor grabs Yvain’s hand and they run, dashing across the concourse and up the no-longer-moving stairs, to huddle behind a shop counter and unscrew a plate from the wall. It falls away to show them ventilation ducts, only just big enough to crawl through - if they have to turn around it’s going to be a challenge, and they do, because the Doctor has come in feet-first behind her so he can tug the plate back into its setting. He can’t screw it on, but it ought to delay searchers. Then he’s shuffling backwards on hands and knees, until she tells him there’s room to turn. It’s not the most dignified thing he’s ever done, and he knows it, glaring at her, daring her to mention it, so she doesn’t, just to spite him.

“Which way?” she asks instead, and he tells her to just keep moving until she finds out where they are.  
“Ha!” she whispers after twenty yards or so. “A ventilation grill, and also, better, a schematic. They made things easy for the engineers.”  
“Very sensible. Nothing more embarrassing than being lost in your own ventilation system. Can you see anything through the grill?”  
“Nothing. Bare corridor. No, wait, there’s a screen.”  
“Video screen?”  
“Yes. Can you get into the live camera feeds?”  
“Why would I want to do that?”  
“So you can find out where they’re keeping the Senator?”  
“I thought we were leaving?” He raises an eyebrow, and she frowns at him.  
“You weren’t seriously going to leave them to die? I was only saying that so they’d stop arguing.”  
He grins at her, and she realises he’s relieved. “Me too. But I think the Senator is probably on the Vanem ship, and we know where that is, because they penned us up where we could see it from the window. Take a look at that schematic and figure out where we’re going. Third level, outside ring.”  
“What are you going to do?”  
“Cause a distraction!”

By the time he’s fiddled with wires pulled from the walls and made the lights flash red and the sirens scream,Yvain’s learned enough of the layout of the station to take them to the Vanem ship three ways over. She demands “Ducts or corridors?” and waits impatiently for “Ducts!” before she starts moving - this is a man who does not trust enough to follow, who must always be consulted. There is a more direct route, marked in the smaller orange lines that match the way they came in; she takes them a second way, along thick yellow alleyways that are wide enough for turning around. The screams of the alarms are too loud for thinking in words, but she is Navarri, and she does not need words to follow a pattern. 

They end up in the wall opposite the breach, where the Vanem ship has suckered itself onto the station and blown the airlocks open. When it leaves, the station will die, bleeding its oxygen into space. The ventilation system can’t take them across the gap. She shrugs at him. “What’s the alarm for?”  
“Hull breach. Right now they should all be scurrying around trying to find out where the explosion was, and we can just pop across and see how the Senator’s getting on. Come on.”  
He kicks the hatch out of the wall - it clatters far too loudly for comfort - and they leave it lying, dashing through the ruined airlock into the Vanem ship.  
Where the station was pale greens and off-whites, to make you think of light and scenery, the Vanem ship is steel and red warning labels. There is no concession to comfort here, only racks full of guns. They ignore them and follow the shouting, until she glances through a door window and hisses “Doctor!”  
They duck into a side passage, and find themselves staring through one-way glass at the Vanem leader, sitting behind a desk and smirking at her prisoner. Yvain freezes, until the Doctor whispers “They can’t see us,” and she dares to breathe again.

The Vanem’s smirk is deliberate and unsubtle, designed to irritate.  
“It’s very simple, my dear. All we require is that you give us information. In exchange, we will provide you with food and lodging and you will live out the war in safety.”  
“No deal. But do keep raising your offer. I’m curious to see how far you’ll go.”  
“If you do not cooperate, you will die.”  
“My life for the Empire? I’ll make that trade.”  
“Yes, we know. It’s some disease you Imperials have, you take war so personally. It’s barbaric. If your species were capable of listening to reason, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”  
“And yet here we are.”  
“Let me tell you what we know. We know that threatening your life will not make you cooperative. We know that threatening your person will not make you cooperate and three of your high-ranking officers have killed themselves rather than risk breaking under torture. We know that you have a fanatical obsession with your fellow soldiers.”  
“We call that part loyalty,” the Senator says, and Yvain’s heart breaks with pride.  
“Yes. Well, your “loyalty” may yet save your life. We shall take you down to your troops - you’ll be pleased to know that their little escape attempt acheived nothing at all - and then we shall execute them, one by one, in front of you. We will torture them. We will make you watch. Eventually, you will talk.”  
The Senator's cheeks flush, and Yvain has time to think _is that what I look like when I’m angry?_ before the Doctor pulls urgently on her sleeve and they’re dashing back to the airlock before the Vanem find them.

They make it back to the Tardis, just, though there are soldiers firing on them by the time they make it through the doors, and the Doctor is urgently programming new coordinates in.  
“Will she do it?”  
“The Vanem? Probably,” she says grimly.  
“No, the Senator, will she talk?”  
Yvain smiles faintly. “She’ll watch every one of them die first.”  
“You’re very sure.”  
“It’s what I would do.”  
“Then it’s a good thing you won’t have to.” He flings open the Tardis doors and strides out, hands in his pockets.

“Good evening. I’m the Doctor and I will be taking care of your prisoners this evening.” The guards around the Vanem leader fire on him, but they’re outside the prison forcefield and the laser fire scatters against it. The Doctor pulls his screwdriver and trains it on the generators. “Senator! Now!”  
The forcefield flares, and for a moment they’re all ducking gunfire, while the Senator, arms freed by the shooting soldiers, throws herself inside the line. The field flashes back into life, and the Doctor has the handcuffs off her in moments.

He strides up to the line, while her bravos are checking she’s all in one piece, and shouts at the Vanem leader.  
“I don’t care about your little war! I don’t care who started it, who’s right and who’s wrong. Nothing is important enough for this!”  
She sneers. “You don’t know much about the Imperials, do you? They’re a plague. They’re vermin. They don’t listen to reason. They’re poisonous, and they want to spread that poison all over the galaxy.”  
“You were going to torture them to death. You call that reasonable?”  
“You’d have to be one of them to care.”  
“No. Not true. Shut up. Shut up, that’s nonsense. You don’t have to be on someone’s side not to want them dead. You don’t have to agree with their defense policies to refrain from torturing them. You are sick. It’s lucky for you there are civilians still on this station or I would bring it down around your ears.”  
“Hear those alarms, Doctor? It’s already going down. One of your Imperial friends blew a hole in it.”  
“No they didn’t. Keep up. That was me setting off the alarms, there’s no hole in the station. Now, I am going to take these people far away from you, and I really don’t care what you think about it.”  
“But - I’ve already messaged command, they’re - they’re expecting me to bring the senator -”  
“Not my problem.” He strides back onto his ship, and calls “Come on, you lot, I haven’t got all day,” over his shoulder.  
The Senator turns to Yvain, and the sensation is uncanny - she’s never cared what she’d look like without scales, but apparently, it’s like that.  
“We’re not leaving.”  
“Why not?”  
“You’ve just announced yourselves to be neutral parties, and there’s an enemy in front of us. We’ll go down fighting.”  
Yvain steps closer, and says softly “I am thrice sworn to the good of the Empire. If you can serve her best by killing a few Vanem here and now, then please, stay here. But if you can do more good returning to our own lines and fighting again tomorrow, then come with us.”  
The Senator stares for a moment, recognition dawning in her eyes. “Who are you?”  
“Best keep that to yourself. But when the Empire calls, I answer, just the same as you.”

The moment stretches out, and then the Senator is moving and shoving her bravos. “Sorry, girls and boys, the Labyrinth will have to wait. No dying today. Get in the blue box! That means you too, Luis, no arguing!”  
Yvain brings up the rear, counting off the bravos like she’s been doing this all her life and shutting the doors firmly behind her. The Doctor is already moving, getting them off the ship so nobody can be tempted to go back ouside. “Where’s your nearest ship, Madam Senator?”  
“Gabriella?”  
The pretty naga reels off a string of coordinates, and Yvain is struck by another resemblance, in how these people speak and move and act around each other. She could almost put names on them, on the two men falling apart on each other now the crisis is past, on how Gabriella watches her commander with wistful pride. She is longing desperately for a priest when Luis shakes her by the shoulder.  
“Hey, dreamer. You coming with us? You owe me a drink.”  
“Sorry. I have work to do. I’ve got to head off again with this nutter.”  
“Oi, I heard that!”  
“You were meant to!” She looks up at Luis, pretty boy that he is. “It’s... it’s been really good, to see familiar faces. We’ve been beyond the borders for a while, and just hearing Imperial accents again was, it was lovely. And I’m glad we could get you out of a tight spot, but - I can’t stay.”

They drop the bravos and the Senator, who gives Yvain a swift, gentle hug and promises to look her up, in the shuttle hanger of a carrier ship on the Imperial edge of the fighting, and Yvain leans her head against the Tardis door as the Doctor takes off again. He holds his tongue for nearly half a minute.  
“Why didn’t you stay?”  
“I had my oaths.”  
“To the Empire, yeah. But that’s the Empire, out there. Two of you knocking around, you’d be running the place.”  
“I _am_ running the place. It’s an interregnum, the Senate’s in charge.”  
“There you are then, nothing keeps you down. So why not go? Not that I’m not glad of your company.”  
“I wanted to. I really did. Back in the Empire again, and who knows what strides have been made in magic - and in space. The Empire, the one I'm from, we haven’t gone to space. Once you get me home I’m never going to see it again.”  
“Then why?”  
“Because she’s me, and from everything I know about souls, that means I didn’t take a six-hundred-year shortcut. I died long enough ago to be reborn as her, that’s me alive again out there and if I don’t die on schedule, she’ll never be born. We can’t exist at the same time. And besides, the Empire needs me - my Empire needs me, in my own time, far more than hers needs a spare Archmage. They’ve got one, they don’t need me as well.”  
He’s silent as he starts the Tardis moving, and she can’t tell whether he approves or not.


	9. Standing at the Threshold

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I don’t suppose I can persuade you there’s no hurry?”  
> “No.”  
> The Doctor nods, and fiddles with the controls, something she’s long identified as displacement behaviour.  
> “But I haven’t ruled out coming back afterwards.”  
> “Well then. Let’s take a look.”

“I know where your home planet is.”  
Yvain looks round, like a dog alerting to prey. “You do?”  
“When we met the Red Foxes, I did a little investigating of their navigation records. Took me a few days to match up their maps with universal coordinates, but I’m pretty sure I’ve got it now.” He smiles ruefully. “I don’t suppose I can persuade you there’s no hurry?”  
“No.”  
The Doctor nods, and fiddles with the controls, something she’s long identified as displacement behaviour.  
“But I haven’t ruled out coming back afterwards.”  
“Well then. Let’s take a look.”

The Tardis shakes and judders, far more than usual, and the Doctor explains someting about dimensional flows and convolutions in spacetime, but Yvain is watching his face and listening to the engines; this is a bumpy ride but there’s no problem, they’re getting through.  
The Tardis falls silent, and the Doctor waves her solemnly towards the door.  
“Your homeworld, the same day you appeared on the tardis. I don’t have maps, I’ve never been here before. You’ll have to tell me where we are. Take a look.”

She pulls open the Tardis door, and stares out for a single breath of time. Then she slams the door and spins in place, planting her feet solidly, blocking the door with her body.  
“Yvain?”  
“This is not a good place to be.”  
“This is-” he checks his screens - “this is a difficult place not to be, in this time. The dimensional ripples pull the Tardis here, like gravity. We’ll have to make do.”  
“We cannot go outside.”  
“Well, we’ll have to.”  
“Doctor, do I panic easily?”  
“Not usually.” He’s smiling, scoffing, trying to lighten the mood, he thinks she’s being irrational.  
“Am I an expert in my field?”  
“Apparently.”  
“Well, this is my field, Doctor. We are in the heart of the Vallorn. We cannot go outside.”  
Understanding darkens his eyes. “The monster. The thing that ate your cities. Magical, like a weight on the landscape. Look, I said I’d try to help you with that, I can’t do anything if you won’t let me see it.”  
“I am not preventing you from studying it. I am saving your life. This is not a passive object, to be examined. This is an ecosystem. The forest out there, it is a cancer. Right now the vines are swarming over the Tardis, prying into every crack in her wood, trying to break her open. The roots are attacking her from beneath, the spores are planting fungus and mould. If you open these doors, those spores, those vines, will come flooding through. We will be dead in half a minute, and we will not stop moving. There will be mud in your veins, Doctor, and thorns in your mouth, and the jungle will own you. It will colonise your ship and then it will absorb the magic at her heart and adapt. I will not stand aside.”  
He comes up to her, very close, and she stares back at him. “And if I say I won’t help you unless you let me see it?”  
“Then go thirty miles in any direction. But not here, Doctor, not at the heart. This is where death lives.”  
“I’ve seen death before.”  
“And are you so tired of living?”  
“You’re really not going to move, are you?”  
There are threats that could persuade me - best not to mention that. “No.”  
“Hm.” He turns away, glancing back over his shoulder, as though she were a mouse not to be startled. “Forget thirty miles. How many years?”  
“...You want to see its beginning?"  
“Can’t send it back where it came from unless I know where that is.” He raises his eyebrows, and she tries to pretend she isn’t trembling with reaction to the battle of wills.  
“The exact date is lost to history, but on the order of a thousand years.”  
“Alright then. Slowly it is. Nobody’s going to notice a transparent blue box hanging here for a millenium or so, are they?” He’s being flippant, because he’s cross, but at least he’s not trying to force his way through the doors.  
“Nobody capable of speech. I suppose the trees might notice you.”  
“What are they going to do about it?”  
“Try to crush you, probably. They’re Vallorn trees, Doctor. They plan.”  
“Right then. Plenty of power to the shields, and let’s take a little trip back in time.”  
He pulls a lever - not the usual taking-off lever - and the Tardis groans, a deep rumbling complaint, and begins to move. “If I can track the dimensional forces acting on us, then I should be able to identify when they change. There’ll be some background effects just from being on your planet, the way the planes intersect here is just amazing, but if we are in the heart of the monster, we ought to see - there.” He lifts the lever gently, and the Tardis grumbles into silence.

She’s on edge, waiitng fo him to race her to the door, and his legs are longer - but instead he lands the Tardis gently, and waves at her solemnly. “If the Archmage would kindly perform her safety checks?”  
“I thought you were cross with me?”  
“You’re an expert in your field.” He leans across the console. “I don’t like being told I can’t know things. But you had your reasons. And no. I’m not tired of living yet.” He nods at the door and this time she moves.  
Outside is not the dark wet green of the forest, but a soft grey overcast day, in a city of white stone.

“It’s beautiful,” she says softly, as the Doctor joins her.  
The city stretches out before them, white towers reaching for the clouds. It makes her heart glad to see them, not the mountainous clusters of the Urizen nor the cathedrals of the League, but a new kind of tower, fluted and strong. These are the buildings of her people. This is her ancient homeland reborn.  
No. Not reborn. Here she is a stranger, the wary daughter of the woods come to the time before trees walked. This is her homeland before its death. But the streets are filled with Navarri, unmistakeably, in square tunics, calf wraps, hoods and jerkins. Their clothes are brighter than in her time, more colourful, not confined to the greens and browns and yellows of the leaves. They wear less fur, and more blue and purple. But their faces are tattooed, and among them are scales and gills, antlers and curling goat horns. Here are people she may walk among unremarked.  
The Doctor shuts the doors quietly behind them, and shoves his hands in his pockets. More than ever, with home ground beneath her feet, she longs for a staff. Her pocket is heavy with mana.  
“When are we?” she asks him, bringing herself firmly out of daydream.  
“About eight hours before it starts. So how did it happen?”  
“We don’t know, except - magic was involved. I’ve seen a document, just the one, which suggested that the towers are the most likely place to find magicians. We’ll know if we find a lot of them, they’ll all have rune tattoos. Probably. I think.”

They head towards the towers, at the centre of the city. In the shadow of the buildings they reach an open place, a crowded hexagon of flagstones, with a tower soaring up at each corner.  
There is a broad dais in the middle, once they have worked their way closer to the front, a dais of white stone like the towers, laid with mosaic. The work is abstract, mottled and swirled with colour, but unmistakeable to Yvain's eyes - this is a picture of the Realms. Sky blue and white and gold, that is for Day, and opposite it, midnight and jewel-deep blue and purple for Night. Spring on her right, emerald and scarlet, with Autumn beside in steel-grey and copper-brown. Winter on her left, black and grey and coldest of snow-whites, and with it Summer, glorious in gold and green and the pink of roses and dawn. Magicians are gathered near it, in little clusters, and many bear paint on face or hands - Queros, rune of plots. A temporary coven, large enough to summon disaster. She wonders how many will die.  
A woman is standing on the dais, leaning wearily on an ornate ritual stave. “Thank you, everyone.”  
“We’ve just missed something,” Yvain whispers to the Doctor.  
“We’ve finished running the numbers, and we will have enough magnitude to reach the new value of the ritual after that prelude. Please, please refrain from calling upon the coven bond for any reason. I can’t stress how important that is enough. If anyone uses the coven bond it will be lost to us for the day and we will have to do this whole preamble again tomorrow, which will be a significant waste of mana and time. Go to your homes or your workshops, do whatever you need to do to get ready, and we will reconvene here at dusk to perform the ritual at sunset. Please try not to be late. If you’ve offered any magical items to the cause, don’t forget them and make sure you are bound to them before this evening. We will have some vates of other realms here if anyone does need to get things bound before we start, but every item not ready is another delay and nobody wants to be standing here at midnight still waiting to cast.  
This is a big project, you all know how important it is. So thank you, and I’ll see you all here at dusk.”  
Ragged applause runs through the crowd, but the magicians themselves look tense and weary.

“Dusk,” Yvain says bleakly. “Huge ritual at dusk, led by a spring mage. This is... Can’t we stop them? Can’t we tell them what’s going to happen? So many dead, Doctor. So many dead, and a thousand years of wandering, we could forestall all that.”  
“Yvain, look at me. We can’t. We mustn’t. I know, I understand what you’re feeling, I feel it too - but I can’t save your home, any more than I could save mine.”  
“Why not?”  
“Paradox. Time can be changed, but not like this. Because we’re here only because this happens. I would never have come here if you hadn’t found me and told me that it happened. If it hadn’t happened, you and I, we would never be here to stop it. I’m sorry, but I can’t save Terunael.”  
“Then why are we here? I’m not -” her voice catches, she’s almost crying, “- I’m not disgreeing. It makes sense. You’re an expert in your field. But you didn’t bring me here to tell me you could do nothing so why is it, why are we here? We’re not just sightseeing.”  
“Because what I can’t prevent, if I can understand it, I may be able to undo. I need to see this, what they’re going to do here, to understand why it goes wrong. I need to see it. And then, we go back. We go back to the day you found me, and we can fix it. No paradox then, that is the earliest moment I can interfere. I can’t stop it. I can’t prevent those thousand years of wandering. But maybe I can make it right.”  
“So we have to watch. Watch them call up the Vallorn and not stop them. Watch them die.”  
“You don’t have to. You could wait in the Tardis.”  
“Don’t be ridiculous.”  
“I’m not. You don’t - it’s not going to be easy, it’s always hard to watch something you care about being destroyed and not be able to stop it. I know it. I’ve been where you’re standing and I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. You don’t have to watch.”  
“You’re not very good at human emotions, are you?”  
“Spoken by someone who has never raised her voice in my hearing.”  
She glares at him, with her best “I can’t quite believe you just said that” expression.  
“Have you heard nothing I have told you about merrow? Do you know nothing of reserve? We do not all wear our hearts on our sleeves, Doctor, and you know that. You know it very well or you would not have told me to leave. You would not have tried to protect a heart you didn’t believe existed. You know damn well that I feel grief. But you have forgotten that there is more than grief in this. These are my people. They cannot know what I know, I believe you when you say that. I choose to trust your judgement. But these are my people and I will not hide away while they are hurt by something I have, however wisely, left them to face. That is loyalty, Doctor. My people are going to be hurt. I am not going to shrink away from what I bring down on them. That is my loyalty to them. That is the meaning of my oaths today. I will watch this.”  
She stares him down, willing him to understand, and he grimaces.  
“I should have seen that coming.”  
“Yes, you should.”  
“Reincarnation.”  
“Exactly.”  
“You would have stood there and watch them all being tortured to death.”  
“Yes. I would. Because the Empire would have come first. I wouldn’t betray the Empire for a handful of lives. Not even for their screams. But I would have watched, and known what I was choosing to permit. Actions have consequences. We learn it in our cradles. Actions have consequences, and you have to face them. You don’t get to pretend that you couldn’t have done differently. You live with what you choose.”  
“Well then. You’ve got about seven hours left. What do you want to know? You’re standing in Pompeii on volcano day, what do you look for? You’re a scholar. You can’t save the people, you can’t save the city. What can you save?”  
“Knowledge,” she whispers, and her heart leaps.


	10. Smooth Hands Shape the World

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I realise that for a Day vate that must seem terribly reckless of us, yes? A dangerous thing to try? Offence may be caused? But that is the difference between our Realms. The Vallorn cannot take offence, the word means nothing to the creatures of Spring. They are forces of nature, pure and simple, and if we can affect them they will simply - go on from there. Even their Heralds barely react to us. It’s likely that the Vallorn cannot even conceive of us as existing as individuals, nor understand that we have caused a change in its environment. What we do, as far as the Spring Realm is concerned, will be - something that happened.”

It doesn’t take much asking around to find out where the Great Ritual is being organised from. The Terun don’t have a civil service, the way she’s used to, but they do have central organisations for the magicians, and she’s quickly directed to the Spring hub.  
A portly man in dark red greets them.  
“Good afternoon. Baisden, Vate of Spring. How can I help?”  
“Good afternoon. Yvain, Vate of Day. I’m new to the city, just come up from the south, and I heard about the ritual being performed this evening. I can’t help with it myself, but I’m interested to know everything I can about it - how it’s intended to function, the magical theory behind it.”  
Baisden raises a bushy eyebrow. “Merrow Day magician. Yes, I expect you want to know everything about it. Well, I can provide you with the briefing we’ve been giving to all the vates involved - here you go.”  
He hands her a slim sheaf of papers, and she puts them straight in her satchel and buckles it closed, trying to pretend these are mere scholarly records.  
“Thank you. I’ll study these in detail later, of course, but I know the ritual is scheduled in the next few hours and I’d like some idea of what I’m seeing - could you give me the summary?”  
He smiles politely. “Of course. Please, sit down.”

They all move to a set of benches, padded but without backs, and make a little cluster, heads together, leaning on their knees.  
“The purpose of the ritual, as I’m sure you’ve heard, is to restore fertility. Over the last century the fields across all our dominions have been gradually failing, and of course so has the birth rate, of both people and animals. The health has been leaching out of the land. Now, we’re still not sure what’s causing that. Scholars have been working on it for decades, but without success.”  
“Why not ask Leviathan?”  
“Who?”  
“Ah. A Day creature I have some dealings with - not one that’s had much contact with us before but I hopes that we may be able to change that. I will look into that possibility myself, it’s a creature of considerable knowledge - but please, I’m introducing a tangent - do go on.”  
“Right. So, the fertility loss still hasn’t been explained, for all the theorising that scholars have done, but the Order of Spring has been working on a different tack. Our plan is to restore that fertility. We don’t expect to prevent further decline, you understand, the idea is to reset the levels, as it were. Not stop the leak, but top up the barrel. We believe that at current levels of loss we can give ourselves another hundred, perhaps a hundred and twenty years of growth and health in which to study the problem. We know it’s a stop-gap, but it should give us the time to really solve the problem.  
So. That requires, of course, a huge ritual. The Order has been working on this for some time, two of the preliminary ritual scripts are in that dossier. They were focused on small areas, one person’s holding and then regions of farmland. What we’re doing now is much bigger. You have the full script in those documents, but as a Day magician you’re no doubt more interested in the theory than the exact method.”  
“Well, I’m interested in both, of course, but I’d rather understand the reasoning behind the ritual than the words I should expect, if I’m to watch it in a few hours.”

“So, the theory. There’s a lot of loose talk flying around about dangerous deals with Eternals, but this is not precisely a deal. We are not utilising any boon or artifact from the Realm of Spring to perform it. We are however drawing upon a specific creature of the Spring realm.”  
“What is its domain?”  
“You may have heard of the Green Mother, often described as the source of life? That’s really a misunderstanding. All spring creatures are associated with life in some way. The Green Mother is focused on individual life, upon the fertility of this woman, or that endeavour. The Vallorn” - and how hard she has to work not to twitch at that name, spoken so casually, with such affection - “is concerned with corporate life. It’s a source of power rarely dealt with, because to summon to Vallorn’s specific strength in order to, say, increase the productivity of a field, risks not only strengthening the intended crop, but also all the weeds, and all the vermin, associated with it. You end up with no increase in the harvest, because the weeds have crowded it out and the mice have eaten it.  
But the universality of the reduction in fertility is so complete that the Vallorn’s power seems ideally suited to counter it. We can infuse the entire country with general - life. Everything will grow more. We’ll have more children. It will be like a background, low-level boost to everything in the world.” Baisden spreads his hands, looking as smug as if it was all his own idea.

“That’s a brilliant piece of thinking. But you said this wasn’t based upon a boon?”  
“Oh no, much better than that. A boon of this magnitude would be ridiculous - you realise we’ll be burning more than six hundred mana crystals this evening? Yes, it’s a massive piece of work. And the Vallorn is not much of a communicator. There are records of it taking more interest in us previously, but we suspect that, with our fertility dwindling, it’s bored of us. We aren’t important to it.  
We tried, you understand. It would have been much easier to do this with the Vallorn’s cooperation, but it simply wasn’t practical. So we turned to the other possibilities.”  
“You’ll be binding it without its consent?”  
“Mm, not exactly. It’s little more nuanced than that. We will be aligning the part of the Realm of Spring in which the Vallorn resides with our own plane - it’s not so much a binding, as a reduction in distance. We will be bringing it closer to us. But yes, we will be doing whether it will or no.” He smiles patronisingly. “I realise that for a Day vate that must seem terribly reckless of us, yes? A dangerous thing to try? Offence may be caused? But that is the difference between our Realms. The Vallorn cannot take offence, the word means nothing to the creatures of Spring. They are forces of nature, pure and simple, and if we can affect them they will simply - go on from there. Even their Heralds barely react to us. It’s likely that the Vallorn cannot even conceive of us as existing as individuals, nor understand that we have caused a change in its environment. What we do, as far as the Spring Realm is concerned, will be - something that happened.”

Yvain nods, glad he’s given her an excuse to look concerned.  
“Well, thank you, Baisden, that’s given a much clearer picture of what’s going on. I’ll be sure to go over these documents - I may have more questions after the ritual is concluded, if you’d be willing to speak with me again?”  
“Why yes, of course. Always nice to have the other Orders taking an interest in what we do. And no doubt it will give you some bargaining power in your Realm, to share some knowledge with your own patrons.”  
“We can but hope. But in the meantime, we’ve taken up too much your time already. I’m sure you have preparations to be making.” She forces herself to keep smiling, make this be a simple polite leave-taking between scholars. “Good luck this evening.”  
“Thank you very much,” he beams back, and ushers them to the doors.

She walks unseeing as the doors close behind them, and fetches up in a narrow street, leaning her back against the chill stone of the nearest wall. The Doctor follows silently, somber, settling next to her without complaint.  
Yvain sniffs quietly and wipes tears from her eyes.  
“What are they wrong about?”  
“I don’t know yet. It could be several things. It could be several things all at once.” She takes a deep breath, putting her emotions away until she has time to deal with them. “The theory is risky in itself. Moving the Realms closer to the mundane world has been theorised as possible, but never demonstrated to take place. Moving a specific part of the Realm is even more dubious. So I’m not convinced by their theory. Infusing an area with the power of a Realm to produce a specific effect is well established, it’s the basis of about a quarter of the rituals in Imperial lore. Coming up with an narrative about actually moving the Realms is rather strange as an explanation. That could cause ill effects, if the picture the magicians have of what they’re doing and the processes permitted by the nature of reality don’t actually align.  
Or they could just be making an Eternal very angry, by trying to bind it without consent. Calling on it would be one thing, but I don’t hear anything about asking nicely. They intend to force the Vallorn to do their bidding and that is risky. That is risky with any Eternal. The Spring eternals don’t take much account of us as individuals but to think of them as emotionless is entirely incorrect. They take offense. Certain actions, certain habits, upset them. Yaw’nagrah hates it when children are killed. Llofir objects to animating the dead. And nothing likes to be pushed around.  
Or, they’re right about the theory and the practice is wrong. They’ve done smaller versions of this ritual, but that does not mean they’ve scaled it up right. There are rituals that don’t scale. There are rituals that scale to a certain point. They’re targeting multiple territories, using a massive amount of mana and if their sums are wrong, or the ritual just doesn’t scale the way they want it to, they could just be overcharging the ritual. Throwing too much power into a shape that can’t hold it. The backlash from doing that usually only hits the ritualists, but usually you’re using a tenth of the mana they’re talking about. Six hundred crystals is unheard of, they must have a huge number of magicians involved. Even if they’re at the top of their game and they’ve mastered it, which are very dodgy assumptions, you’re looking at minimum a hundred magicians working together. You can throw a coven together at short notice if your script is clear but I would not like to chance it on a hundred magicians working together smoothly. Maybe the ritual just falls apart, too many people pulling in too many directions. Maybe someone gets their lines wrong. Maybe it was never going to do what they think it will. I don’t know. I can’t know. I can find out, in my own time, perhaps. I might even be able to get the Conclave to fund me. Why did the ritual to restore fertility to Terunael fail? Or maybe they just overcook it. Maybe the ritual is going to function exactly as designed, and they’re just mistaken about how much Spring they can throw into the world without side effects.” 

Yvain runs down into miserable silence, tracing her tattoos one by one, until the Doctor gently turns her back to business. “Where will they do it?”  
“On that mosaic dais, I’m fairly certain. I think it’s a regio, a powerful one. It’s probably vital to the ritual, if it’s like the Imperial regio at Anvil - and there’s another question, is it the same regio? Does it move itself there, or does someone move it, or are there two of them?”  
“It’s probably in that stash of documents you’re carefully not looking at. Why haven’t you gone through them? What are you planning?”  
“Take them home, make about a hundred copies of the lot, and hand them out. Have them couriered out to every major coven I know of and every major library. Annoy the hell out of some Urizen.”  
“Annoy?”  
“Oh yes. There are some Urizen who’ll be horrified at letting such dangerous knowledge into such untrustworthy hands. They will object to my lack of discretion, to my reckless spreading of a ritual script which already ended the world once. Let them. Secrets don’t serve us. This is a political act, Doctor, bringing me here, didn’t you know that? You’re putting knowledge in dangerous hands. You’re breaking the seal of safety around these things, letting a Navarri know their own history. Very dangerous. Very unwise. You’ve shown extremely poor judgement letting one of us see this.”  
“Bollocks. Who else has the right to it?”  
“Why, the aloof scholars of the mountains, who do not let emotions affect their judgement, and who are certainly not susceptible to human foibles like prejudice and contempt, and the smug conviction of their own superiority. Such emotions would be beneath them and thus they cannot possibly be affected by them.”  
“Also bollocks, but you know that.”  
“Of course, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t satisfying to rant about it. What happens now?”  
“We wait.”


	11. Rising Roots that Rend Stone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They wait. They wait while the slanting golden sun of afternoon makes the city sparkle, while the grey clouds give way to vibrant blue skies. They wait while Yvain feels a dossier burning holes through her satchel, and looks longingly at gorgeous hand-written bound books she cannot buy, for she has no money, and they have not invented the printing press yet to make books easily produced. They find a meal, a good solid affair of bean stew with rice to thicken it, and all the time they eat they are waiting.

They wait. They wait while the slanting golden sun of afternoon makes the city sparkle, while the grey clouds give way to vibrant blue skies. They wait while Yvain feels a dossier burning holes through her satchel, and looks longingly at gorgeous hand-written bound books she cannot buy, for she has no money, and they have not invented the printing press yet to make books easily produced. They find a meal, a good solid affair of bean stew with rice to thicken it, and all the time they eat they are waiting.  
It is a strange thing, waiting for the end of the world. Yvain is sure she should be learning, doing, making something, but all there is to do is keep her emotions in check and wait.

She begins to be aware of how these people are not like her, for there is no talk of Virtue or Empire here. Terunael is less a nation than a collection of cities all looking inward, with an alliance between them, a shared culture, and as much rivalry as cooperation. Some of the bands of sturdy leather-clad fighters are mercenaries, come to sell their strength as bodyguards or in messy private wars between bands. There are no stridings and steadings, yet, but the Terun do not care for family as the League do - they have something far more familiar, the chosen commitment between groups of friends, the idea of the Dance that leads you in every life back to your own people. For them, there is no transcending the cycle.  
Neither of them are in the mood to make new friends.

By the time dusk falls, Yvain wants to be gone. It is all too real and close, the beautiful city full of life. She could live here unafraid for all her days, in one of those lovely fluted towers, in the Order of Day that she was born for. She probably is here already, somewhere, in this city or another, living amidst the strength of lost Terunael, before the fall.  
They make their way to the square with the dais, and she lets the Doctor ramble on about planets he has seen and people he has met, knowing that this is his way of not thinking about what is coming. She has not asked about his own loss, how his home fell or what part he had in that fall, but he has said enough. This is an echo of his own death to him, and if he could save Terunael, he would.  
He does not suggest saving the Terun when the time comes, and she does not ask, because every survivor is needed here. The more who escape the city to live in this time, the stronger her nation will be. Some of them are her own ancestors, and she cannot know which. Some of them will be reborn in the Empire as people of importance, and she cannot take them out of their time without risking that. The damage it might do - she does not know whether reality would heal itself, permit some to be saved, but she will not choose who should live and who should die.  
She watches the magicians gathering around the regio, and she says nothing.

She can hear half-familiar voices amongst the growing crowd, and she opens her eyes and strains her ears for them, those snatches of her own people in another time. That is Vespasian, there, that cambion of no particular height, and there beside him - Tertius? No, look at the tattoos, look how they turn towards each other - that is Octavia, and they are lovers in this time too. Those two are certainly Gwen and Gwyllem, though their heads carry no horns today. And there, the unlineaged man in sensible brown, there is Roland, strange without his bright naga scales, his Dawnish manner, but still himself. Still with that same confidence in his step.  
She does not see herself, and she is glad.

The ritual begins without fanfare. The mages just start, Navarri to the bone. They take their places around and upon the dais, and Yvain and the Doctor move back with the crowd, giving them the space they need to work.  
The magicians make themselves into a pattern, regular and even around the central mosaic, and that is how the leaders know when they are all there, the network whole and strong around them.

The working is vast. The mages stand at arm’s reach from each other, to pass mana and flaming torches around the circles, forward and back and around and out again. The pattern is simple, and Yvain feels her own breathing settling into the rhythm of it, the throbbing beat of the great central drum. It is a dance, power and purpose flowing around the chain of mages. She does not need to check the script; this is Navarri magic, Terun magic, and she can read the ritual like a book. Here, drumbeat and silence, tapping the mana, torches passing, weaving themselves tightly into a single purposeful entity, raising the power they carry into a flame, ready to reforge the world. Here, the single voice in the centre, crying out their need. Calling to the Vallorn, by name, and Yvain’s eyes are wide in fear. Calling to it, crying out for it to see them, to recognise their demand for more life, more children, more crops, more green in the grass and more rabbits in the warrens. She feels the pressure as it responds, the heavy wet answer of the Realm, and now the ritual changes, the mages breaking into motion, turning this way and that, dancing their magic into shape. They shout, the patterns overlapping, a song in the round, and what they speak binds the Vallorn. They make no requests, they do not demand. They take. They chain it close, holding it in place, and Yvain can feel it struggling to break loose.

“It doesn't like it,” she whispers, half-choked with terror. “that’s what they did wrong. They’re forcing it to stay and it objects.”  
The Doctor has his screwdriver out, scanning and rescanning the ritual, tiny green light and buzz as irrelevant as a gnat against the power building in the circle. “I need to see the end.”  
“It’s going to be soon.”  
The Vallorn is fighting now, power thrashing out of shape, whipping through the crowd, and some of them are running and some are screaming, and then it comes. The beautiful mosaic cracks, right across the centre, and the drummer falters in her rhythm. The magicians chant, fierce and determined, and tread their steps, but it is all falling apart, the ritual escaping their grip, the power lashing out at them, and they begin to fall.  
They drop, blood in their mouths and their eyes, and Yvain backs away by instinct, years of ritual magic telling her that this backlash will not confine itself to the casters.  
“Doctor. Time.”  
“Just a moment!”  
“Running out of moments.”

The mosaic splits across the middle, like an eggshell being forced open, and from the ground and out of the air a shape pushes through into reality, a shape that is all jointed legs and faceted eyes. It does not resolve into a singular creature; instead it seizes the terrified drummer around her waist in sharp scarlet pincers and throws her into the crowd. Her bones crack as she lands, but all the screams are from the crowd; she lies deathly still, and the vines leap from her flesh and into the stone. Within moments she is gone, swallowed up in thorns that drip with her blood, and every person touched by those thorns is dragged into the writhing mass.

The creature at the heart of the ritual howls. It howls with a sound beyond nature’s bounds. It is the creak of wood, the chittering of beetles, the buzz of insects and the roar of sap through leaves. The Doctor stands frozen, as the ritualists are consumed or caught or cast aside, as the bodies under its many feet explode into rotting clouds of mould and fungus. The insects start to hatch, and Yvain makes one last desperate dash, towards the centre, towards the Doctor staring into death’s eyes, and drags him back by the collar until he turns and they run, run with every breath in them towards the Tardis.  
They are lucky. They know where they are going, and how to get there, and in all that fleeing crowd they know that safety exists. They fall into the Tardis and slam the doors against the swarming creatures that follow, against the carpet of tangling grass that springs up under their heels.

Yvain rests her forehead against closed doors and pants. Memories replay before her eyes, of the man she knows to be Vespasian falling dead before the Vallorn ever came through, of Gwen and Gwyllem back-to-back and swinging staves at the ravening thorns. She dares not - she will not - open the doors, but the loss haunts her, the blank white barrier between her and the death of her city is a prison. She cannot watch the vines pull down the towers, and it aches.  
The Doctor sets the Tardis in motion, and she doesn’t turn around or ask where. She clings to the doors, taking deep sobbing breaths that never quite become weeping, long after the engines stop. She doesn’t move until the Doctor lays a hand on her shoulder, and pushes the doors silently open.  
Outside, there is nothing but stars.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “No, don’t feel sorry for it, it won’t care. It won’t even notice, don’t waste your pity. No, the point is that there’s no reasoning with it, you can’t talk it out of something it’s even aware of doing. It can’t stop. So we have to take another route and that’s the part you’re not going to like because I could destroy it and I’m not going to.”

They sit in the Tardis entrance, legs dangling in space, and drink tea. It is hot, and bitter, and he has remembered not to put milk in it. It burns through her numb insides.

The Doctor stares out at the stars, and does not ask questions. She thinks he is hurting, by the frown, the grit of his teeth, above all by the urgent attention to the galactic night.

They are floating somewhere near her world. She traces the few constellations she knows, the brilliant line of the Three Sisters, the arch of the Phoenix, naming them softly for the Doctor. A brilliant blue spark moves across the sky, and she knows that it is her own world, gliding like the Wanderer through the constellations.  
“Do you tell fortunes with them?”  
“The stars? Not exactly. The constellation are like runes, they have significance. The Urizen like to call on them, in their rituals. They have names, and meanings. They don’t hold power themselves, but they teach us to shape it.”  
“What do they mean?”  
“I wish I could tell you. But I’ve never learned astronomancy. What the Terun were doing today-” she almost doesn’t stumble over the name - “that’s the kind of magic I learned. Patterns, and blood, and runes. I work with runes a lot, it comes naturally. The stars I have never studied.”  
He finishes his tea and tears his eyes away from the stars, instead staring at her, thoughtful and grave. “You mustn't give up. You need to hold on to hope.”  
“No. I need to be ambitious.”  
He frowns.  
“Hope is a temptation to apathy. Hope says it will all turn out alright, and I needn’t make sure of it. Hope is what you do when you can’t change anything. You hope for good weather, you don’t hope for the restoration of your home. You have ambition. You say, I will make it so, no matter if it looks impossible. No matter if it takes me all my life, I will find a way. I will not stop working. I will catch the sun in my hands, if that’s what it takes.”  
He clambers to his feet. “Come on then.”  
“Hm?”  
“Let’s get to work.”

“Okay, so, like we thought, it’s a dimensional creature. Its natural home isn’t really in this universe at all, it’s in the Realm of Spring, which is basically a little local plane of existence. Or, not exactly local, but it’s not really hospitable elsewhere - it’s like there’s six planets overlapping with yours and that’s where the Eternals live and that’s the only place in maybe the whole universe that those planes are habitable by anything. Or maybe it’s like deep space, they’d need to cross it in ships to find some other hospitable place. Don’t really know, I haven’t been there although that would be interesting if I could. Anyway, the Vallorn is huge. It’s a creature about a billion times bigger than you are and it doesn’t belong in your world. It’s probably not trying to hurt you, it just has no way to control it. Things that move into its orbit become a part of it, they get assimilated because that’s what it is. It can’t help that.”  
“Okay, so I should feel sorry for it? I don’t blame storms for killing people but that doesn’t make them less dead.”  
“No, don’t feel sorry for it, it won’t care. It won’t even notice, don’t waste your pity. No, the point is that there’s no reasoning with it, you can’t talk it out of something it’s even aware of doing. It can’t stop. So we have to take another route and that’s the part you’re not going to like because I could destroy it and I’m not going to.”

Yvain stops, stares, processes that information. “Thank you for being honest.”  
“You’re welcome. It’s this new thing I’m trying. Could destroy it, with a bit of work, not going to. Not sure what would even happen to your world if I did, but that’s not why. It doesn’t deserve to be destroyed. It’s not evil. It’s - what did you call it, a storm? It’s a storm. It’s a force of nature. It is unique in all the universe, so, not going to kill that if there’s another way to help you, and there is.”  
“Okay. Not killing it. Some other method. What’s the other method? We send it back?”  
“Exactly. We do something very clever, reverse that whole breaking a hole between the planes idea, move the Vallorn out of your world, back into its own world, you get your city back, it goes back where it belongs, which it’ll probably prefer, if it even notices, everybody’s happy.”

_Sure,_ Yvain thinks, _apart from the tens of thousands of people who have taken binding lifelong oaths to destroy it; but my oath says “oppose” and I think moving it out of my dimension and locking it away in the Spring realm qualifies, so let’s not discuss the way it might destroy my career._  
“How?”  
“Something clever.”  
“What clever thing, Doctor?”  
“Something. I’m working on that. Hold down this button, will you?”  
“What are you doing to the Tardis?”  
“Setting her up to ride out the dimensional currents your planet’s riddled with. Otherwise, we’ll just keep going to the same place we started in, in the middle of that - forest isn’t quite the word is it? Anyway, there. Not the most useful place to be when you’re trying to work. We won’t be able to go far for a while, what I’m doing to the navcom is going to wreck the long-range navigation until I undo it, but we’ll be able to move about on the planet’s surface without doing it on foot. Which ought to help.”  
“Speaking of which, I’ve got an ox and a dog waiting for me on a Trod somewhere.”

The Doctor straightens up and knocks his head on a screen. “Ow! See, this is what happens when you drop bombshells. What do you mean, you’ve got an ox and a dog?”  
“I have an oxcart, which means I have an ox to pull it,” she says patiently, like explaining to a child, “and I have a dog, for company and hunting assistance. And he’s very good at spotting where the trod and the path don’t quite match, which is important. Sorry, would telling you this have made you try harder to get me home? I was assuming somebody would find them and look after them, and if not, there was nothing I could do about it from space. But if we can move about in time and in geography then I can go back to where I disappeared from, can’t I? Say, half an hour later? And look after them myself.”  
“Yeah. Yeah, okay, that’s not a bad idea. I’ll drop you off, you look after your little menagerie, and I’ll meet up with you when I’ve finished setting up my clever idea.”  
“Have you had your clever idea yet?”  
“I’ve got an inkling. Not figured out the details yet. Might take me a little while. but I know what I’m trying to do now and I have got all the numbers about where these planes of existence that you call magic actually are and how much energy it will take to get between them, so, basically, yes, I know what I’m doing.”

She raises an eyebrow, and he has the grace to look sheepish, so she lets it go. She can’t actually force him to have a plan any faster, and besides, she has her own reasons for wanting to be home.  
“Doctor.”  
“Mm?”  
“I do want you to drop me off where I started, but I don’t want you to pick me up straight away. I don’t know how long your thing is going to take you, but I also have a thing. I need - I want - to get this through the Conclave. Formally, I mean. I shouldn’t do this without informing the Empire, as whole, what I’m doing, because if I - if we - cock it up, they need to know what we did. I’m not even the Springmage and really this is his remit. He’ll probably want to meet you.”  
“Is he going to complain?”  
“No. No, he trusts my judgement implicitly and if I tell him it’s going to work, he’ll go with it. But it would be unacceptably rude to do something this huge in his realm without warning him, so he can handle his end of the politics.”  
“Unacceptable to who? He’s your friend, he’ll understand.”  
“Unacceptable to me.”  
“Is this you being Archmage again? Is this your Archmage face? Is this what you’re like when you’re doing politics, because I like the adventuring you better.”  
“Yes, this is me thinking in political terms. Do you actually have a problem with the idea or are you just being ornery?”  
“Mostly I’m being ornery. Are you cross?”  
“I’m impatient and want to get to work, which I can’t do until I am on the road and able to write letters.”  
“Alright then. Here we go, dimensional surfing enabled, we’ve got local navigation. Scanning, scanning, there we are, there’s your planet, we’ve got a map. Tell me where I’m dropping you off, and where I’m meeting you.”


	13. Shared Mastery of the Magician's Guild

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The familiarity, the mundane routine of life, almost breaks her heart. She would think she had been dreaming, she honestly would - but her notebooks are filled with the traces of her adventures. There is a sheaf of hand-written documents in her satchel, complete scripts for Vallorn rituals she knows she doesn’t have the expertise to write herself. There is a key, weighty as a favour, on a chain about her neck.

Stepping out of the Tardis into the cool dawn air is, if anything, stranger than appearing on it in the first place. The Doctor hands her an impossibly mundane key and tells her to hang onto it so she won’t get lost, then pretends he isn’t watching her go. She shuts the door without a goodbye, and the Tardis immediately takes off, leaving her alone on the road.

Except not alone; here comes Shadow, her heavy-boned grey dog, come to sniff her hands and make sure she’s in one piece. She hugs Shadow for a very long time, and if the dog’s fur ends up wet, dogs do not tell tales. Huw, big stupid ox that he is, wouldn’t care if she vanished entirely, and doesn’t complain at being hooked into his traces.

The trod out of Broceliande is long, and not entirely safe. It takes her three days to walk out of it, ears always open for anything trying to ambush her, but all she meets is three stridings going in the other direction. She smiles and says hello, and camps with one of them overnight, but they let her be when she doesn’t seek out company. The familiarity, the mundane routine of life, almost breaks her heart. She would think she had been dreaming, she honestly would - but her notebooks are filled with the traces of her adventures. There is a sheaf of hand-written documents in her satchel, complete scripts for Vallorn rituals she knows she doesn’t have the expertise to write herself. There is a key, weighty as a favour, on a chain about her neck.

Her plans for the season have changed, because mad or not, she needs to talk to the Springmage. Forget where she was walking, wherever it was; she’s going to Urizen, by the fastest means possible. It’s tempting to pass by Anvil, and ground herself in her responsibilities with the sight of the Senate and the Hall of Worlds. It’s tempting to pass through Therunin, to visit her mother at Bronwen’s Rest. But the fastest route to Urizen is to miss those places entirely and take the ferry down the River Couros and south, along the coast, to the towering spires of the mountains and the cliff-side dock of Shatterspire.

Shatterspire has been destroyed twice by animated Spring creatures that Vespasian assures her are not Vallorn, but which cut it off from the landward side. She has left Huw in Casinea, rather than take him on the boats, and now the funicular railway carries only her and Shadow up the cliff-face.  
She comes unannounced to the doors of the Spire, and several Urizen pass her in silence, appearing not to notice her. She reminds herself not to show strong emotion without deliberate cause, but it’s hardly necessary. She is too much the merrow to run and shout without thinking about it first. Her staff is enough cause for her to be here, in any case. It was in the way all the journey, once she abandoned the cart - the ridiculous bulk of the Archmage of Day’s symbol of rank, too tall for doorways, too heavy to balance in one hand, threatening any minute to fall over and concuss someone - but here, in the self-appointed heartland of Imperial magic, she carries her staff of office and walks tall.

She does not know who to approach, but a youngster comes to her after a few minutes in the entrance hall - she has been studying the vaulted arches of the roof, and did not really notice the time passing - and greets her politely with her title. She is welcome to the Spire - the Arbiter has been informed of her presence and invites her to stay as long as she would like.  
“I am grateful to the Spire for your generosity,” she says, calm and even, because she knows enough to be certain that it is not Tertius’s right to tell her to stay or go. “If you have nothing more pressing to attend to, I would appreciate being directed to the Archmage of Spring.”  
The youngster hesitates. “The Archmage is in his workshops, Archmage, and has requested not to be disturbed. I will show you the way to his workshops, but if the matter is not urgent, perhaps you would prefer a guest room, and to have a message conveyed to him?”  
“Thank you, that would be helpful. It is a matter of the highest importance, but I do not wish to interrupt him unnecessarily. I would also prefer to bathe before engaging in serious work.”  
“Of course, Archmage - the guest rooms are very close to the baths.”

Vespasian finds her as she is combing her hair, still damp from washing. He is a tall man, and broad, whose face is half covered in brown-green smudges and whose cheek sprouts thorns through solid bark. He wears a glove on his left hand that she has seen removed only once, concealing the bark that grows there too. He came late to his lineage, caught in a magical accident, and the Spring that hums in his blood makes life hard for him, here in the quiet stillness of the spires.  
“Will it cause offence to shut the doors and speak privately?” she asks, choosing frankness over delicacy.  
“None at all.” He is not pacing, but from the way he moves his hands, over and over, he would like to be. He cares very much for his poise, his appearance of emotional control, and she’s about to challenge that. She’d rather do it in private, where he has only her to worry about, and he knows she won’t give a damn if he appears to have feelings. She swings the beautifully balanced doors shut.

“You have news,” Vespasian says without preamble.  
“Yes. And yes, it is important enough to bring me here unannounced. I need the Archmage of Spring.” She drops into a chair, because he can stand for hours and will if she doesn’t set a lead, and he follows, leaning forward on his knees, hands twitching gently.  
“You have him.”

Yvain takes a deep breath. “You recall the last time I discovered something about the Vallorn. We thought that was big. It was big enough to claim an Archmage’s staff with. I have found something that makes that discovery seem like child’s play.” He is intent on her words, mismatched eyes, fixed on her face. “I can’t explain how I came by it, only describe. You once showed me a partial copy of a ritual script, a set of runes, used in the original ritual that created the Vallorn. I have the full script. I have copies of the smaller rituals used to create the great one. I have essays detailing the theory behind it and the progression of the blight it was designed to cure. I have in short a copy of the information that was given out to all the magicians involved in the ritual, and it came to me from the hand of one of those magicians some six hours before the ritual was performed.”

He is very still, processing the impossible things she is saying - but this is not only the Archmage of Spring, it is Vespasian, her good friend, and he will know she is not lying.  
“How?” He makes a short, irritated gesture, brushing that question aside. “What happened?”  
“There is an impossible man, in a blue box, who walks among the stars. He’s not an Eternal, but he’s very like one. The universe is full of life, on millions of planets, more than we thought possible. This man can reach them all. He has instantaneous travel to any point in the universe he pleases.”  
“And also any time.”  
“And any time. I have stood in Terunael, and seen that ritual performed.”

She stares down at her own hands, faint blue nails and the spreading expanse of blue skin. “And so I have come to the Archmage, to show him all those documents, and I have come to my good friend Vespasian, who will tell me if I have gone mad.”  
He leans down, to be in her field of view, and smiles at her. “No. You have seen something that may not have been real. But you know it, and so you are not mad. Although it is possible you have suffered an injury to the brain - where are the documents?”  
She nods to the neat stack, on the low table beside her. “I know how fast you read.”

It’s tacit permission, and he takes it, leafing through the pile with uncanny speed that in anyone else, would mean he had ony identified each page - for Vespasian, it means he has read every word, and understood them. By the time she has finished plaiting her drying hair, he has finished them, and is flipping back and forth, correlating the various documents and their claims.  
“In one sense, the ritual functioned as intended,” he points out.  
“It did. And the mana burned away. They did, technically, complete the ritual. The Vallorn, however, appeared to object. It’s hard to say, given what those documents tell us about its inherent nature.”  
“Did it break through?”  
“Yes. Violently.”  
“Did you watch?” he says urgently, and she knows he’s worried for her.  
“How could I not? Ancient Terunael, alive before me, about to fall, and I did nothing to save them. He told me I could not. The impossible man with his impossible ship, he told me that we could not save them. That if we prevented the ritual, I would never have found him to tell him it needed to be stopped, and so he would not stop it - it would create a paradox the universe could not sustain and more than Terunael would be destroyed. So I did nothing. I stood by and watched it fall and labyrinth take me, Vespasian, I still don’t know if he was right.”

He does nothing, but watches her through solemn eyes, until she gathers the strength to meet them. Then he speaks, softly, carefully, choosing every word. “There exists no universe in which Yvain Worldscribe, being who she is, has the power to save Terunael and does not do it.”  
“Unless it is this one.”  
“No. Terunael is lost. If you were capable of saving it, you will have already done it, and I would not know it had ever fallen. You cannot live with that doubt. You cannot spend your life second-guessing. You have brought us knowledge we might never have had. You should be proud.”  
“I will be proud of what I do, not of impossible men in boxes,” she says, but she’s smiling.  
“What will you do?” he asks, glancing at the documents.  
“Copy them. Spread them. Send them to all the libraries and every magician I know. It will offend your scholars, I know, but I will not keep this secret.”  
“So why come to me?”  
“To see if I was mad?” She smiles wryly. “Because the Archmage of Spring should know this information, and have time to think before next Conclave. Because this is your Realm, and your responsibility. I came for advice. What should I do with this, besides make it known? What words of caution should I add? And because the impossible man in his impossible ship has an impossible plan, and I think you should know about it.”  
“What plan? Tell me.”  
“He believes he can use his ship and his technological expertise to return to Vallorn to the realm of Spring from whence it came.”

That is too much, and Vespasian is on his feet, pacing to and fro on his long legs. “All at once?”  
“All at once. Just like that.”  
“Where is he?”  
“I don’t know. Somewhere on this planet, at some point during its past or future, working on, and I quote, “a clever thing” to send the Vallorn back. He is due to meet me on the outskirts of Anvil at the start of the next summit.”  
“Can he do it?”  
“I truly don’t know. I’ve seen him do amazing things, but... Opposition to the Vallorn is written on my bones, but so is belief in its strength. It is not easy to believe that anyone can just wish it away.”


	14. Hand of the Maker

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> By the time the summit rolls around, three weeks later, they have a plan.

By the time the summit rolls around, three weeks later, they have a plan. The Archmage of Spring and the Archmage of Day travel together, by ferry and overcrowded train, discussing their strategies and sending last-minute letters to strengthen their webs. Tertius, Arbiter of Shatterspire, Grandmaster of the Celestial Arch to which they both belong, listens to their plans and smiles his exasperating smile and makes no promises. Promises would be superfluous. He will either stand with them or not; they will proceed regardless.

The first thing they require is for the Doctor to keep his appointment. Everything hinges on that; if he doesn’t come, they will simply present the new information as an archaeological discovery, giving Yvain the credit at Vespasian’s insistence. If he comes, there will be more work to do, and more risks to their reputations.

He is there. When they leave the train at the little hamlet of Anvil Gate, half a mile from the constitutionally protected Imperial capital, a dark blue box is slotted tidily into a gap between houses. Most people don’t even look at it, as though something about its inbuilt camouflage was working even while its appearance didn’t change, but Yvain walks straight up to it and knocks on the door. The Doctor opens it with a glare all ready to go, but it dissolves into confusion when he sees Yvain. “You’ve got a key,” he points out, and she blinks.  
“Yes. Sorry, I forgot about that.”  
“Did you do your thing?”  
“Yes. The man with the staff is Vespasian, he’s the Archmage of Spring, he’s important to my thing and we have a plan.”  
“I probably shouldn’t mention the -”  
“No, you should not. Nor should you offer to shake his hand. It’s rude where he’s from.”  
“Okay. No contact. Fine.”  
“Did you do your thing?”  
His eyes gleam. “Yes.”

The Doctor insists she come inside and look at his clever little devices, which she’d have preferred not to do - the switch between worlds is making her head hurt. He’s positioned them around every major Vallorn infestation, and she asks warily about the small ones.  
“No, they won’t matter. It’s the big ones you’ve got to get. I know, I know, it sort of metastasizes, you get new outbreaks of it in places it didn’t start from. But it’s the cities that really matter. You know one of them is in a swamp? It’s half underwater. I nearly got drowned running from giant bees and I do mean giant, these were really quite large bees.”  
Yvain smirks. “I grew up in that swamp.”  
“Did you? What, with the bees and everything? What do you do about the bees?”  
“Avoid them, shoot them when they find their way indoors, and be very very careful when collecting honey.”  
“Honey’s not worth that, you’re all mad. Anyway, I have put these around all the old cities, all the major outcroppings on the Vallorn into your dimension, and they are all keyed to this.”  
He presses a little box into her hands. It has a glass cover, and under the cover it has a single brass toggle.

“Just flip the switch, and the Tardis will transmit the signal. The dimensional deflectors will activate and separate out all the Vallorn-y bits from the real world, and send them shooting off into the Spring realm again.”  
“Side effects?”  
“Yes, well, it will also remove any other Spring magic that’s hanging around the place, so you’re going to lose a few enchantments or whatever that you’d rather have kept. No way to avoid that, I don’t have the technology to distinguish the Vallorn from other stuff from the same plane.”  
“What about the Briars? People live inside those areas and some of them are Spring-touched. Like me with Day.”  
“Oh, they’re all going to die horribly.” 

She stares, because if he’s telling the truth, she’s still going to do it.  
“Okay, okay, no they’re not all going to die horribly. Might give them a headache, I can’t rule that out, but they’ll be fine. The energy in your cells that comes from that plane is not the same thing as a dimensional shift. You’re not actually twisted into those dimensions, you’re just sort of connected to them a bit, and it won’t sever that. It’s just going to flatten out the planes again. Probably feel a bit strange for anyone caught inside but nobody’s going to die from it.”  
“Is there a time limit?”  
“On using it? No, but I didn’t think you’d want to wait.”  
“I’m going to,” she says decisively. “I’ve been working. We have a plan. I’ll use it tonight, during conclave, and then - well, if it works, I’m going to go down in history, and if it doesn’t, I’m going to be laughed out of office by tomorrow.”  
“Well. Good luck then.”  
“Thank you.” She puts all her depth of feeling into those two words, and he flaps his hands at her.  
“Go on, go, you’ve got politics to do. I’m going to go and watch it working, which it’s going to. Will I see you again?”

She looks over her shoulder, hand on the door. “Same time next week?”  
“Don’t be late.”


	15. Alignment of Mind and Blade

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “By means I shall explain when I am not on the clock - I have seen the fall of Terunael. I have stood in the city of Terunael, in the heart of Broceliande, and witnessed the ritual that created the Vallorn. From that knowledge, this device was created. I do not know how it works. But I am not here to ask your permission. I am a Vate of Navarr and I will take every step available to me to destroy my enemy.”

Anvil, by constitutional decree, is forbidden to build upon. It remains now what it was seven hundred years ago, when the Empire was founded, and the constitution signed by eight nations in the ruins of a blacksmith’s forge.

The old forge stands still, still ruined and roofless, but now it’s a tavern and tough white canvas is stretched over the old beams. The Senate is the only other building here permanently, and it too is roofed in cloth, over the plain boards of the Senate floor, over the plain Speaker’s chair and the dais, over the throne. Around those stretches only a bare field, grass clinging on at the margins, the soil wrecked by centuries of booted feet upon unpaved ground.

Anvil, capital of the Empire, fabled in song and story, is a muddy hellhole. In summer, the ground cracks like pie crust, baking in the sunlight, and dry as bone. Their feet raise dust in great rolling clouds, and Yvain’s eyes swell shut, unless she wipes and wipes with damp cloth, to clean her eyelashes of the clay that turns everyone’s skin a shade darker. In winter, there is mud, heavy sucking mud, deep flowing mud, mud that climbs the privy walls to above head-height and soaks every leg to the knees. They return every quarter in their hundreds, and the circle road that runs through every nation’s camp never has time to green over.

The Civil Service are putting up the Hub when Shatterspire arrive with Yvain in tow, and she splits off at once, to seek out the brown ridge tent standing sturdily familiar across the road from it, facing out towards the world, firepit and benches standing ready for weary travellers. This is Bronwen’s Rest at Anvil, the wayhouse on the road, first tent you come to in the Navarri camp.   
Here is her mother, setting up for the summit, who would be Gatekeeper of Prosperity if only she would accept the title, and immovable as mountains on the bench outside is Uncle Geraint, her mother’s oathbound husband, cleaning dried mud off his knees with a stiff brush. Navarri families are simple, too simple for most foreigners to understand. There is between two people exactly what they say there is. There is no obligation for a family to resemble a kinship diagram.  
There are greetings, and joyful ones, for those who can read Merrow expressions, and see in a tight hug and a soft “how are you?” all the love of years.

The first order of business at most summits is the Standing, in the clear patch at the entrance to the woods that they don’t put tents in for precisely this reason. They gather in a dense circle, around their shouting Senator who thinks himself more important than he should, and listen to whatever he and his friends think worth telling them. Yvain agonised over this meeting for days, trying to decide whether she ought to speak - it’s her right, as it is every Navarri’s right, to speak at Standing if she chooses, and for all the senator is an ass he won’t actually try to stop her. She has news, but she knows the news might come to nothing. If the Doctor’s device does not work, she will lose her position in Conclave at the very least; there is nothing to be gained from raising the nation’s hopes. Nothing but rumours, and controlling the rumours around this is part of the plan. So she swallows back her words, and listens insteads to the usual news about the military situation and newcomers to Anvil.

The second task, before anything - she’s not even going to go to Brand’s Council today, she has far too much work to do. Her second task is to go to the Hub, where the Civil Service are wearing their usual harassed expressions, and raise an Conclave address.

This is her right, as an Archmage, once per summit, to address the Imperial Conclave without paying for it. Usually, this first address of the summit would be called something like “Matters pertaining to Day” and she would give the Conclave a precis of where things stood - nothing would have changed since the end of the last summit, to a high degree of probability, but people had poor memories and it was useful to frame their reminders, keep them all pointing in the same direction for the upcoming diplomatic contact. But today, she is not talking about her Realm. She puts down “The Destruction of the Vallorn” and counts on the obvious assumption that she’s talking long-term strategy to keep her plans out of the rumour mill.

She runs through her mental list of allies. Vespasian is her co-conspirator. Tertius will do what Tertius will do, but his reputation is bound up with theirs; he won’t interfere. The other Archmages are not involved, and don’t need to be warned. The Grandmasters likewise; they aren’t her allies, they’re rivals, however much mutual respect there may be. It will be an exercise in quick thinking for them all.  
A true ally is Lady Marian, Gatekeeper of Pride, and Yvain hunts her down, in the Dawnish camp with her glittering family. She speaks softly, warning the knight that she is planning something huge, and that it may all go wrong, and that if it does, Vespasian will fall with her - "so keep this to yourself for now, Marian, please, and I’m not going to give anyone details ahead of time - but be prepared, tonight and tomorrow, for the fallout. One way or the other, we’re going to change the world or we’re going to commit political suicide tonight."  
Then she finds her Senator, for unlike the one who throws his weight around at Standings, Rhianna is a sensible woman who takes time to think, and warns her that if she hears very strange rumours about things happening to the Vallorn or the Navarri this summit, Yvain is likely to know something after Conclave tonight; Rhianna thanks her for the advice and wishes her good fortune. It wouldn’t be the first time that Yvain has sprung changes in their knowledge of the Vallorn on that particular Senator, after all.

So the evening passes, with warnings and precautions, and a looser eye than usual on the Conclave agenda. Everything after her own address is irrelevant; she’ll care about it after this works. Conclave dignitaries and coven heads seek her out, in ones and twos, to ask about her news, but she gives them all the same answer, a smile and a wait-and-see.

At ten minutes to ten, she passes through the walls of reality at the Anvil regio, and enters the Hall of Worlds.

Much like Anvil itself, this storied chamber is plain and sparse. It is nothing more than a room, with a few paintings on the walls, benches and cabinets of knicknacks, and a set of sandtimers; but it is a room full of mages, the best magicians in the Empire and the most political. Once, she would have used this time to greet her friends and discuss the upcoming motions, but that changes when you become an Archmage. Suddenly, you are a focal point of the room, and for the next quarter hour she is very busy, answering the questions and listening to the news of every Day mage with something to say. She does her job, keeping her focus on what they are telling her, all the matters of the realm that will, after all, still need her attention in the morning.

The counting is mercifully swift tonight, few people trying to join orders at the last minute and the two civil servants who facilitate this chaotic body moving them through the procedures with sarcastic efficiency. The Celestial Arch is halfway up the precedence tonight, attendance no doubt swollen by rumours that their Archmages are planning something. Yvain hardly notices what any other address is about. She is too busy making significant eye contact with Vespasian and checking the Doctor’s switch, heavy in her pocket.

At last, and far too soon, her turn comes around, and she stands before the Conclave. Every mage of significance in the Empire is in this room, staring at the stocky woman with the outsized staff, the ridiculous book on the top casting shadows over their faces. 

“Colleagues,” she begins, hearing the civil servant turn over the first sandtimer behind her, “once before I have stood here to tell you news of the Vallorn. Today I must do that again.” She holds up the switch, ready and waiting in her right hand. “This device was given to me by a creature that is, and is not, akin to an Eternal. A being of great potential, and potentially great danger. I will be in this chamber tomorrow, as soon as the gate has closed after battle, and I will tell anyone who comes of all my dealings with that creature. For now, I will tell you of what he has offered. This is a boon, freely given. It is offered because we need it, and nothing is asked in return. Something will be given,” she says sharply, “we will not be indebted to him, for what he desires and does not ask is the friendship of Yvain Worldscribe, and he shall have it. What he offers, if he can do as he has promised, is the complete destruction of the Vallorn.”  
“One minute!” calls the civil servant behind her, and Yvain stops. There are rules.

The nearest Navarri fumbles in her pouch for a mana crystal and demands “Keep talking!”  
“By means I shall explain when I am not on the clock - I have seen the fall of Terunael. I have stood in the city of Terunael, in the heart of Broceliande, and witnessed the ritual that created the Vallorn. From that knowledge, this device was created. I do not know how it works. But I am not here to ask your permission. I am a Vate of Navarr and I will take every step available to me to destroy my enemy.”  
In the ringing silence, she flips back the glass cover, and toggles the brass switch. The Hall of Worlds shakes, briefly, impossibly, and is still.

Someone, she doesn’t even notice who, is playing their part in this drama, screaming at her about daring and having no right and taking unilateral steps, and the Conclave is shouting them down because it is her right to speak, and here is Vespasian, striding forward, to shout “It is not unilateral!” in the startling deep voice he reserves for Conclave arguments.  
She straightens her back, takes half a step backwards, and says calmly, “I invite the Archmage of Spring to speak on my time.”

The Civil Servant shrugs, because she has that right within the rules, and announces “Vespasian has the floor!” The Conclave subsides into furious mutters and whispers, and Vespasian speaks over it as though it were no more than rustling leaves, his voice cutting through the muddle.  
“It is not a unilateral act. Two weeks ago the Archmage of Day came to me at my spire and shared with me these documents.” He brandishes the sheaf of briefings, the scripts and the theories. “This dossier is the same that was provided to every Terun magician in preparation for the Vallorn ritual. I have studied them. I have spoken with Yvain in great depth, and she is not insane. She is under no enchantment. She is not cursed. These documents correspond exactly to the archaeological discoveries made by my spire in recent excavations. And much as I respect the Archmage in her own realm, she does not have the expertise in Spring to falsify these! I will leave it to her to explain to you how she came by them, but they are the real thing.”

Yvain hands the civil servant manning the sand timers another mana crystal, holding it high to be seen first, so that Vespasian can keep speaking.  
“When the Archmage came into possession of this information, and of this boon, she came to me, as Archmage of Spring, to consult on the proper course of action. This was not unilateral action. I fully support her in her decision to use the device tonight. I remind the conclave that it is not their place to give permission to Imperial mages! This is not a gatekeeping body. Magicians of the Empire are free to serve the Empire or their own prosperity, exactly as they see fit. You may forbid us from repeating these actions. You may censure us. You may pass declarations condemning our actions. But you had no right to pre-judge those actions. The Conclave has no right to dictate what a mage shall do. Questions? Tertius.”  
“What have you learned from those documents?”  
He knows, of course, and Yvain blesses him silently for asking that, and not one of the hundred pressing accusations of arrogance and hubris the Conclave want to scream at them. He has given Vespasian a way to keep talking, and Yvain’s eyes are on the sand timers - ninety seconds, at least.  
“One minute!”  
“Oh, I’ll pay for it,” grumbles the Grandmaster of the Unfettered Mind, and Yvain nods to him in acknowledgement.

“We have learned that the Vallorn was not created by the Terun. The Vallorn is an Eternal. Before the fall of Terunael they had many dealings with it and knew it well. The ritual that summoned it forth into the mundane world was intended to infuse all the territories of the empire of Terunael with its power. It was regarded as the eternal of corporate life, of the vitality of ecosystems. Terunael was suffering from a creeping blight, a loss in fertility of crops, animals and people. We know this from other sources. The Vallorn ritual was indeed an attempt to reverse this process. It went wrong. Obviously. It went wrong and the Vallorn was not merely bound, it was summoned. That is why no simple ritual has ever reversed it. That is why it cannot be exorcised. It is not an enchantment, or a curse. It is an Eternal, and the solution is to return it to whence it came.”

The sands in the timer are running down, the last few grains falling, and Yvain’s heart is pounding, because it has been two minutes and thirty seconds since she flicked the switch. Two minutes to cast Winged Messenger, that was what they needed, for the delegations at the edges of four Vallorn sites to cast their rituals.  
“One minute!”  
Vespasian falls silent, and Yvain is saying softly, “we’ll go to comments from the Orders,” when the first sheet of paper flutters out of the air and into her eager hands.

Someone throws a mana crystal - literally throws, and misses, and the civil servant has to find it among the tiles on the floor, but he waves at her to keep talking anyway. The timer turns.

“To Archmage Yvain of Day, from Izmara i Erigo of the Handful of Dust, presently on the outskirts of Liathaven,” she reads clearly, loudly, forcing the Conclave to listen through sheer force of will. “As promised and paid for, a truthful report on the state of the Vallorn shortly after ten pm on the first day of the summer summit.  
The Vallorn is in retreat. It withdraws rapidly, covering several miles in a matter of seconds. Where the forest of Liathaven was, I see only farmland.” She smiles, relief flooding through her veins, at the last line. “And then she proposes marriage,” she tells the Conclave, and they laugh, and the tensions is broken. 

The second Messenger delivers its note to Vespasian, and he announces it boldly. The timer has run down, but the Civil Servant who ought to be watching it is as rapt as anyone. “From my sodale waiting in Therunin. Rapid change at the scheduled hour. Vallorn infection no longer visible. Therunin has reverted to a wetland. Significant reduction in tree size and coverage.”

“From Broceliande,” Yvain says jubilantly, “from the Vates of the Broch: We see the orchards of Terunael. The air is clear, and the thorns are gone.” She takes a deep breath. “Colleagues of the Conclave, tonight you have seen history. I encourage those covens with the means to scry upon the territories held by the Vallorn, and tell us what you find. I cannot promise that the task is finished. But will anyone now condemn me as a sorcerer?”

The applause is immediate, joyous, and overwhelming. Even the Urizen are cheering, for Poise means showing emotion only when appropriate, and what else could be called for tonight?


	16. Horizon's Razor Edge

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “What about you?”  
> “I can’t do this forever. I have responsibilities. I’m going to have to spend time in my own time, to keep up with the day job. The quarterly summits, for definite, and at least a few weeks in between.”  
> “But in the meantime?”

The applause must be set aside, in the end, and the Conclave agenda grinds through in its usual manner, though the Warmage shrugs at them and withdraws his gambit, for he wanted mana to restore the damaged trod network in Reikos, and who knows now whether the trods even exist?

When the work of the Conclave is done, Yvain speaks up one last time. “My friends, I have promised to answer your questions, and I will, but not here. My nation waits in Anvil, and I owe them my loyalty. I will speak to them tonight. You are welcome to join us, on the edge of the woods. I expect we will be there until dawn.”

Then comes the Standing, uproarious and ragged, unexpected to everyone but her. She remembers shining eyes, eyes from every nation, among that ring of listeners. She remembers her mother, beaming with pride in her, shouting down Bryn, who would contradict her even on such a day as this. She remembers reading out the messages from her carefully placed observers, over and over, and the demands from the Hercynians for why they were left out - “You weren’t,” she says simply, “the Hercynian response was to come to Vespasian and I haven’t seen him since Conclave ended.” She remembers Joshua, who she refused to marry but still loves, pushing his way to the front and throwing his arms around her, hiding his tears in her shoulder, and she holds him tight, hiding her own. She remembers other hugs, not less urgent, from other allies - the knights of House Novarion come on mass, and bury her in a pile of red-gold tabards. Roland lurks in the crowd, sidling to the front where he has room to sprawl on the ground, and listens rapt to every tale she spins. The Foxes, so like their future selves in their red masks, come to the camp in battle order, masks bold over grinning faces, and salute her, roaring loud to the joyous sky.

The rain comes, but it does not stop the gathering. They move thirty yards, under the unwalled canopy that is used by the Bourse and the Synod, and someone blessedly finds Yvain a high table to perch on, leaning exhausted on her Archmage staff. Vespasian finishes his work in the Urizen camp, telling refined tales to a carefully quiet audience, and joins her on the table, sparing her hoarse voice with details of the Vallorn ritual and the documents she found, telling of how they planned it all, in carefully scripted lessons that will make them sound wise and vigilant, and not reckless.

By two in the morning, most have gone to bed, and those who remain have split into a dozen eager conversations, no longer turning only to Yvain and Vespasian for their news. It is a celebration nobody wishes to leave, and Yvain whispers to Vespasian that there is a song they ought to be singing. He looks at her with the shining eyes she has always loved, the look that tells her she is special and clever and has made him understand, and he starts, in his deep carrying voice, the Battle Anthem of the Empire.  
They sing it through, and then through again, and then people begin to hug Yvain goodnight, the song breaking the spell that kept them bound.

She does not sleep until dawn, turning over consequences with her allies. The barbarians will no longer be kept out of those territories by the Vallorn, that was always going to be the price, and the generals have had to rethink their whole defence plan, which two have the bad grace to berate her for but five congratulate her on her victory, so that doesn’t worry her overmuch. The Navarri will still be nomads for a time, as they reclaim their homelands at last, and if the Vallorn is not entirely destroyed - but the regions have been scried now, all of them, by every ritual known, because the Warmage is thorough, and there is no sign of Vallorn there.

The morning is harsh and dry on Yvain’s gills, on eyes that ache with too little sleep, but the word went all around Anvil last night and everyone wants to clap her on the back and buy her tea. She lets them, but makes no pretence of being quite awake yet - that is part of her charm, apparently, and she has made it part of her act, the politician who is not quite so poised as all that, and too honest to fake alertness she lacks.

She attends muster at the Sentinel Gate, as she always does, though she has nobody to enchant today - Novarion will fight with Dawn tomorrow, and she will have a ritual to do then. The generals confer, as they make their plans, and she is watching the glittering armour of the League and preparing to sing the army off to war when the Generals start making their speeches, and call her out by name.  
She stumps forward, overshadowed by her staff, and bows to the assembled army, as she is presented on a whim as the woman who destroyed the Vallorn. “It was a little more complicated than that,” she calls to the crowd, “I did have help!” but she knows the good has already been done. Her place in history is assured.

She is called into the Senate before noon, to be an expert witness for them, and tell them what she has done. She recites it plainly, the bare bones script that she memorised before she set foot in Anvil this summit, but when Empress Mathilda steps down from her throne and bows to her, Yvain cannot keep back the tears.

By the time she makes it to the Hall of Worlds, after the army has returned through the Sentinel Gate (and there are too many casualties today) she is hoarse again, and tired.  
She settles on the floor, propping her back against a narrow pillar, and smiles wearily up at her audience of magicians. “Here as promised, but if somebody could arrange for food and tea, I would be very grateful - I have been telling this story since ten this morning.” Somebody does slip away from the back of the group, and she hopes they are obliging her, but she hasn’t time to worry about it after that. She is too busy reciting her script, and then answering all the questions that Senators and Generals do not care to know and magicians cannot help wondering about. How did the ritual work? How did it go wrong? Should it be interdicted? What was she going to do if her plan hadn’t worked? What if it had gone wrong? What damage might she have caused?

She is on trial here and nowhere else, for these are the people who saw her theatre and felt their own reputations diminish when she succeeded. Tertius comes in after half an hour and hands her tea; she drinks it gratefully, and notices too how he draws off her sternest critics, to discuss the purpose and principles of the Conclave. He has her back, as her Grandmaster, their reputations bound up together.  
The attention is flattering and tiring in equal measure, but what really warms her heart is Octavia, Vespasian’s quiet partner, who never comes to Conclave because she must be in the Senate, bringing her the food she had forgotten about. Octavia makes no demands, only hands her a bowl of kedgeree and stands with Tertius to defend her, in her sober and thoughtful way, from those who would call her sorceror.

By the end of the summit, it is clear just how much she has achieved. The Vallorn is gone, gone back to the Spring realm, and the first of its heralds in a thousand years have come through the Hall of Worlds - the Navarri vates strike them down at once, and Yvain grins at Vespasian and tells him that is his problem, Springmage. Heralds of the great Library and Ylenrith come for Yvain, the one to request a copy of the documents, which she has ready for them, the other to invite her to an audience, which she accepts, and spends a contented hour telling Ylenrith, beautiful charming dangerous creature, what she has done - and then two more discussing the philosophy of time, which is the best possible tonic for Yvain’s frayed nerves.

When the summit ends, she goes no further than Anvil Gate. She hugs her family, shakes Vespasian’s hand, bows to Tertius. Then she goes to the wayhouse, where Huw snuffles at her from his stall, and holds Shadow for a very long time. She soaks in the bath until the dust is out of her gills and the ache out of her muscles. She spends three days writing notes, for posterity and Phaleron, and letters, for there is planning to be done before the next summit.   
The sound of the Tardis materialising wakes her, dozing in the afternoon warmth, and she settles her notes safely in Huw’s cart along with all her regalia, before she walks out to meet it.

She gazes at the deep blue doors for a long moment. She has responsibilities here. The Doctor is a trouble magnet. She may well be hurt. She may well be killed.  
She owes him, in her bones, in the strange lightness of the oath tattooed upon her right temple, which has no object now.  
She can use him, strange impossible man, in his strange impossible box. He can give her knowledge. He has already given her Empire strength.  
She turns the key in the door.

The Doctor is reading in his big chair, pretending he wasn’t waiting, or perhaps just waiting for her to decide. She shuts the door behind her with a soft click, and leans on the railing around the balcony.  
“Thank you.”  
“Told you it would work.”  
“It was perfect.”  
“How’d it go? How’s the Archmage?”  
“The Archmage is extremely secure in her position. I think the only way I’ll be losing my title in the next year is if they make me Empress instead.”  
“Can they do that?”  
“I hope not, Empress Mathilda would have to die first. But they could.”  
“What about you?”  
“I can’t do this forever. I have responsibilities. I’m going to have to spend time in my own time, to keep up with the day job. The quarterly summits, for definite, and at least a few weeks in between.”  
“But in the meantime?”  
“In the meantime, the Empire can stand the risk of losing me. And the Empire owes you. More than we can possibly repay. And I owe you. You could have just flipped that switch yourself, as soon as you had it set up. You didn’t. You set me up to win. You gave me a way to make political capital out of your work and I did. I seized that with both hands and when they put me in the history books it will be because of what you gave me. So thank you. And that’s not just my position speaking.”  
“You don’t owe me. I’m glad I could help. But, while you can spare the time, there’s still a lot of universe out there to see.”  
She grins at him, and he’s already on his feet and setting the coordinates. “Show me a planet?”  
“Right away, Archmage.”

The sound of the Tardis taking off is something far more wonderful than homecoming.


End file.
